I've installed gentoo but there seems like there's so many sacrifices. I love that it's all open source, but I really don't mind closed source software now and then, because after all I would be using it to play closed source games. The biggest compromise I've observed is the very long build times. I have a lukewarm cpu(i3 10100) and it's powerful enough for good gaming but the build times are still like 10x minimum for some software. All this to say, is using gentoo really worth it? I love the idea behind it, and if I was doing criminal activity I'd definitely use it, but is there some absolute upside to it or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?
Gentoo is more about the fun of building a Linux distro that is perfectly tailored to your hardware and personal preferences. Sometimes you'll see a performance increase of 0.01%, sometimes 25%+. Just depends on a lot of different things.
The build times are really only a consideration on first or second install of the OS. And even with your first install, you'll probably want to start with the pre-built options, and then gradually move away from that to compiling more and more of your own system.
There are a couple apps like Firefox that also have pre-compiled binaries available for Gentoo, so no waiting there. Of course, there's also Flatpak for desktop-based apps.
Otherwise, you just compile what you want, when you want. And you can tell Portage how much in terms of cores/threads/resources it gets to use when compiling, so that it can just run in the background while you're doing your normal thing (or scheduled for when You're not using your machine).
Portage is also a phenomenal package manager, and can track and satisfy all dependencies for you as-needed. You can also specify what elements of your system to keep on stable, vs testing, etc. It's not like Slackware.
Gentoo is what was used to build ChromeOS, along with many other distros. It's as complex/simple, secure/insecure, private/un-private, latest-and-greatest/LTS as you tell it to be. You can choose to update things continuously in the background, or just once a week overnight, or on any other schedule that you want.
You'll probably learn some new things in the course of installing it, but follow the handbook to the letter, avail yourself of the community, and be patient to start with. It works for me, and I like it, but there are plenty of excellent pre-cooked distros that are also great. I'm just a tinkerer by nature, and enjoy getting increasingly more out of my machines over time.
Gentoo is good for learning. It's not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you're tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a "one step up" distribution.
Gentoo can be good if you desire some very weird or exotic configurations or just want more granular customisability that binary DIY distros don't offer. The way it's built allows that in a way that makes it easier there. If you don't really need that and aren't a fan of the build times, it won't hurt going for something like Void or Arch which are also DIY distros but all-binary so you don't need to worry. (unless you use xbps-src or the AUR).
As a developer the cool thing about Gentoo is you can have a full debugging stack. You can compile every single library and program on the system with debugging symbols and source and you can trace an issue all the way through. It's really not possible to do on other distros. Having learned a bit more about gdb when debugging, it is really cool.
Gentoo also has closed source software available. It just uses the ebuild to configure the install.
Chrome for example.
Gentoo is not sold as a privacy or criminal OS. It is used for customization and optimization that you cannot have in the same way without rebuilding software.
or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?
Privacy and usability are inversely correlated. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has a relatively weak definition of "privacy" or a relatively exotic definition of "usable". If you're at the point of installing an OS like Gentoo just for its privacy benefits alone, I'd say you're already the latter case, even from the perspective of most fellow Linux users.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily imply very un-private software is always very usable, or that highly privacy-respecting tools with good UX don't exist. Just that most highly UX-polished software tends to have poor privacy, and most privacy-focused software expects the user to do a lot of hoop-jumping to make up for all the systems and workflows the user can't utilize due to having some dealbreaking non-privacy-respecting component to them.
Definitely not for my use case which is just having a desktop where I can write documents and surf the net. So I just don't go for it.
It appears it is not for your usecase either. I would second going for all binary distros like arch or void.
You have a relatively weak CPU for Gentoo -- there is no denying that. The upside of Gentoo is that you can make it exactly how you want it, it will be truly tuned by you for you unlike anything else. I ran it myself for a while. And if you want security, if you have the time to really understand the hardening options Gentoo can be more secure than anything else. As I said, how good Gentoo works and what it can do is a direct function of the user.
