I've used Gentoo for a long time, and Gentoo (as the article notes) is quite similar to BSD in some ways. It too has a base system. There too the user compiles packages themselves from scratch (though precompiled binaries are available for a handful of packages) in a system like ports (called "portage" on Gentoo). It too has no systemd (unless you want it).
I like Gentoo and still use it, but my biggest problem with it is that compiling packages takes a hell of a long time (especially some monstrosities like QT or webkit, which can take me days or even a week to compile on my old, slow laptop). You really have to have relatively modern system to compile all your packages from scratch, if you don't want to have to do it non-stop, virtually 24 hours a day. It's really annoying. I have better things to dedicate my processor cycles to and my own time to than constantly compiling packages.
So maybe I'll switch. I'm not sure to what, though. I've thought of BSD, but it has the same problem. I don't really like the idea of binary distros either, because of their relative inflexibility (no choice to include/omit package features that you want/don't want), and honestly, I don't really trust binary blobs as much as compiling from source... though maybe in the end it doesn't really matter.
I like Gentoo and still use it, but my biggest problem with it is that compiling packages takes a hell of a long time (especially some monstrosities like QT or webkit, which can take me days or even a week to compile on my old, slow laptop). You really have to have relatively modern system to compile all your packages from scratch, if you don't want to have to do it non-stop, virtually 24 hours a day. It's really annoying. I have better things to dedicate my processor cycles to and my own time to than constantly compiling packages.
So maybe I'll switch. I'm not sure to what, though. I've thought of BSD, but it has the same problem. I don't really like the idea of binary distros either, because of their relative inflexibility (no choice to include/omit package features that you want/don't want), and honestly, I don't really trust binary blobs as much as compiling from source... though maybe in the end it doesn't really matter.