I mostly stick to things in the repos, if theres something I want that’s not yet packaged I package it myself because Gentoo packages are fancy bash scripts with libraries (eclasses) to handle the normal make && make install sort of things for most build systems

I still use X11 because one of my necessary voip apps (mumble) doesn’t yet support wayland’s method of global hotkeys.

Otherwise I don’t particularly care one way or the other.

one of the reasons I love gentoo is how easy it is to package things for it.

You know how for pkgbuilds you have to explictly write out the whole configure make make install stuff that pretty much every package uses some variation on? Gentoo abstracts that out to libraries (eclasses) that handle that sort of thing for each build system so you can focus down on anything unique to the package, like build system options.

I just automated syncing daily and sending myself an email with the emerge -pvuDU world output. I usually actually run the update once or twice a week.

kubuntu is already literally just a package.

if you just install kubuntu-desktop (or something similar) from any buntu flavor you get it.