As a long-time Gentoo user and supporter, my main issue is the time investment. Not the investment in installing and initial setup, not compilation in the background (binary packages make things much easier today), but staying up-to-date with software upgrades and changes. I did not mind it before the "life happened", but now when it takes even one available night in a month or two, it seems a lot.
Other issue is when you need something promptly, if nothing else to test it out or one-use only and you either have to wait or use something like official binary/flatpak...
Whenever I think that the time I invested in some of the mini-projects is lost/wasted time and that it was probably better choice to do just about anything else instead - I come across something like this. The only thing I can conclude is that there is no such thing as wasted time, as long you enjoy the road.
This might be too harsh... Do not think it is betrayal, but it is idiotic and can understand someones frustration with it. On par with FreeBSD developers using MacOS to develop their OS.
People easily install these without being concerned about security or privacy. I am actually more curios if these are audited at all or the risk is solely on users?
I use GNOME only in throwaway VM, but even there - only the extensions available in official repository are used.
If you cannot audit it and supervise it, do not offer a point-and-click way to install it. Do not rely on end-users experience and sanity nor the good intentions of random people online.
Installation of Gnome extensions or KDE themes (unless official package from distribution's repository is used) always seemed as unnecessary risk to me.
Although I do prefer look and feel of the GNOME and most of the software I use is GTK, I use Plasma as well. The main issue I personally have with GNOME is it's dependency on 3rd-party extensions. For start, it's missing clipboard manager and notification tray that you get with Plasma out of the box (as well with other DEs and OSes). You want the dock? Again, you need the extension. Then you upgrade and at least one of the extensions is lagging behind.
I knew about Trinity right from the beginning of project (back then it was available in one of the Gentoo's overlays), but I am genuinely surprised it is still running and they actually introduce new features to the DE and applications. It is remarkable effort.
I went this rabbit hole roughly 2 years ago and I just quit at the very end, because my focus went from using the OS for something productive to maintaining it, securing it and becoming home sys admin.
Since then, I’m simply “ignorant” and sane - use it, update it regularly, use official software sources (so official distros repos and Flatpaks), FDE, SecureBoot, do not run random net stuff (like scripts, “Git” etc.), try to stay as default as possible and use a VM to experiment if I really need to.
I am curious - how many of you regular desktop Linux users actually had security issues (or at least suspected something shady)?
I am running “full-blown” desktop with relatively minimal Plasma (I installed only the KDE software I actually need). The initial setup was quite straight-forward, without any tweaking or particular issues. I do use binary packages (available in Portage) for the stuff I do not care - like LibreOffice or Rust compiler.
Upgrades where you are expected to do something rarely happen and even then it is fairly simple.
The major downside is when you want to try out something - it takes time usually, so it is not instant as with binary distros and other OSes. For now, when I am not willing to wait, I just use Fedora VM to test stuff first.
Gentoo ended my distro-hopping phase back in high-school/college student days (17-18 years ago). Top class documentation (the title moved to Arch in the meantime) and helpful, supportive and knowledgeable users of their community taught me so much about Linux. Additionally, although I'm not educated nor working in CS field, Gentoo got me curious about programming languages, build systems and compilers (as a hobbyist). I used it happily and exclusively for 6-7 years (then moved to Windows at work and Mac at home).
From summer of 2020 I restarted with Gentoo on my new home desktop.