One point no one has mentioned and I've wondered from time to time myself is whether one can expect gentoo to continue into the future for a long while, as compared to the likely hood of opensuse or maybe debian that has been around a very long time.
It seemed at one time a year or so ago that gentoo's longevity was questionable. (Possibly my own mis-perception) For the OP, a few posters have mentioned that under gentoo, every thing is compiled from scratch, but it was not made clear that it happens again and again at most updates. No one has made clear that there is a very HUGE amount of time sunk into compiling absolutely everything. A single update, if one lets updating slip a bit, can literally take days to compile. And more days to reconfigure so that everything works again.
