I got mine from https://serverpartdeals.com/ that was before Trump 2.0, but it appears prices to EU are still ok. Shipping was brilliant. They appear to have 14TB for about 180 USD.

Your control over the system is so great in Gentoo. While other distros may pull in a dependency you will never use – say like cups – gentoo allows you to remove the dependency by removing support for it at install/compile time.

I love how the portage packages are maintained, it is so easy to find which versions are available, select version, read about why a package is masked and having all the tools for overriding that decision by the package maintainers and install anyway. They inform you about important updates and migrations when you sync your package repository. It is also super easy to patch the code being installed.

I would not say portage is complicated. For most operations you just install a package, sync, and upgrade like you would in any distro. It tales time to do this, sure. What is complicated is, I would say, figuring out how to boot your machine. You want encrypted this or that, dropbear, systemd or openrc, want to manage your initramfs with dracut or make one yourself, distro-kernel or another flavour, and on and on. I also think that the wiki is not very detailed on a lot of what the different systems do and how they talk to each other.

Anyway, I love it. If I would start with Gentoo today, I would install a Gentoo Prefix

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix

There you can get used to the portage package manager withour messing up your system and without doing a reinstall.

Maybe that makes more sense. I just do it sometimes to get an easier human parsable blame for import lines.

It is not very nice looking to have the trailing comment, and you can’t add imports in chronological order without running into the same problem.

I used xmpp with otr encryption… maybe also omemo, it rings a bell. This was some years ago. But it was barely usable. Otr refused to connect at times and only unecrypted worked, messages were encrypted with wrong keys or something and history became unreadable. It worked on the desktop, but then not on the phone, only with this and that client, but not those. It was a confusing mess and I had to stop using it. If it works today, thats great.