Gentoo is an open book test on compile flags at all times.
All you have to know is all your system variables, compiler flags that exactly two distros use, init, daemons and hardware and it’s great!
On some level I admire the people who know that stuff, but I’ve had my OS compiled for me for a long time. I loved portage once I figured out how to use it though.
I might add some version of Suse (open or enterprise) to that list though. Last I checked there were a bunch of shops kicking the tires as cent os shut off. Didn’t keep up on how that turned out.
Zypper is very solid, and I can’t say anything bad about suse, but it was 15 years ago I was strictly working off of VMs while the company I was working at advertised support. If there wasn’t the Debian social contract I think a lot more projects would have forked it.
They had a better reputation down the company chain than redhat, but the orders always seemed to go to IBM.