I avoid mentioning that I run gentoo
But when I have to, I try to explain that customizing things down to the source code couldn't be any closer to the true™ spirit of linux if you tried, and it's a shame that other distributions introduce a heavy maintainance cost when you try to do any of that, to the point you're sometimes better off just forking the distro.
This repository has been published to help substantiate this argument. Gentoo is, ironically enough, the easiest distribution for me to use. It has a ton of flaws and is really messy, but nothing else comes close.
If you're snooping around, or I sent you here, I recommend checking out the patches/
and env/
directories, as these are where the real power resides. If you've heard Gentoo is "powerful" because of USE flags, that's really only scratching the surface.
Most everything else is bespoke portage configuration, where I try to work around bad defaults and other things I don't particularly like.