Through a few deals, hardware failures and hardware acquisitions in the past two weeks I have had the pleasure of installing Gentoo about 3 times and those experiences have made me reflect on exactly why I love Gentoo. So really what is it that I love about Gentoo? It pretty much boils down to 3 things, ease of maintenance, speed and security.
Now when I say that it is a pleasure to install Gentoo most people tend to roll their eyes and wonder what kind of drugs I'm on. Really, what could be so great about watching your computer turn somersaults for an entire day compiling hundreds of megabytes of C code? The idea here is that it is very fast to get a Gentoo install going. I have a pre-flight checklist that I go through on every new box. I can usually take care of that in under 10 minutes. After pre-flighting the system its pretty much send it on its way to compile and go do another task. Sure, installing the OS in this way adds an extra day of lead time to my server builds but I'm in no rush and I could save myself the time by making custom stage4 tarballs for each hardware platform (which I am doing) but lately I have had 3 new arches flow through the shop for which I did not have a custom stage4 so it wouldn't have helped much anyhow.
A big bonus for Gentoo is that it is fast (in a totally non-ricer sort of way). Seriously now, tell me when was the last time you bounced a server in under 2 minutes? How may people can say they run a very active development web and database server with a memory footprint of less than 100MB? All that and more is possible with Gentoo if you know how to tune it properly. Because Gentoo allows you to compile directly for the type of hardware you have and does not just use a generic compile host you can make much better use of the special features of your hardware. Plus, with the -* use flag you can very precisely tune what is and is not installed on your system.
With the speed comes security. With hardened Gentoo and the glsa tools I feel confident that my server is very secure. Sure, you have to know what you are doing to secure it properly but that is the case with just about anything, at least the tools are available to me to properly secure my systems.
Finally, and really the most important reason that I choose to use Gentoo is the manageability. Portage and the host of other tools available for it make managing multiple Gentoo servers a breeze. With Portage I have been able to develop scripts to download, build, distribute and notify of updates that are pending all while properly resolving the dependencies and looking out for broken systems. No other package manager that I have used from RedHat to Debian is as flexible and powerful as Portage.
To date I have significantly dedicated my shop to Gentoo servers and with every good experience I have with them I see fewer and fewer reasons to ever change. Gentoo rocks!