Is Gentoo Linux usable for a human in between?
 

Who is neither a linux noob, nor a computer programmer/professional, I have termed him/her as a "human in between" in the subject line.

So I am this human in between, I can do lot of things from command line. I installed and used Debian from netinstall image (minimal system) in the past. I am currently using Arch Linux.
And I am planning for installing Gentoo. But I am not a computer professional/administrator/software progrmmer etc. I just know simple C/C++ programming, somewhat microprocessors and their programming.

I want to know particulary from other Gentoo Linux users whether I can use it for my daily work on laptop, such as a normal user do (like running office, media, web browsing etc. apps).
Or I have to face occasional breakage in Gentoo stability for which I need to be a programmer/system administrator.

So in a nutshell, I want to know what kind of technical problems a person face on Gentoo Linux.
(Particulary I would face if I am going to use Gentoo Linux.)
e.g.
1) On Debian there is not a single problem I faced about stability, but no latest software.
2) On Arch Linux system, I face library version incompatibility in dependency of programs which I do not like but resolves easily.
3) What about Gentoo?

Can a person like me live a happy computing life with Gentoo Linux? :)

Much like Arch, Gentoo is what you make it. You can create very stable, robust systems with Gentoo. The installation documentation is very thorough, and the forums are very good, and surprisingly noob-friendly, as long as you are not an idiot, and ask intelligent questions and search for existing answers.

My particular concern with Gentoo is whether I can have partial upgrades on Gentoo?
unlike Arch Linux, where

Ref. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...re_unsupported
"Partial upgrades are unsupported."

For the latest softwares, I know that Gentoo has quite a good recent versions of softwares.

I think anyone can install Gentoo that is able to follow instructions and search for a solution when a problem arises. I'm not a programmer by any means, I can't even do scripting, but have install both Gentoo and LfS.

I know Gentoo is not difficult to install, but do you also find it 'not difficult' to use?

I wouldn't say Gentoo is significantly different from any other CLI driven distro (i.e. Arch), in which regards the everyday usage case.

As for what you call "partial updates", the fact that Gentoo is built from source allows for a higher degree of customizability in that regard, since you don't have to match ABIs from different package sources and/or versions. If the ABI breaks you just recompile the package against the new (or the old) version of the offending library, and it will just work.

Portage has become very intelligent at handling ABI breakages as well as dependencies, as long as you don't do silly things (such as downgrading glibc). The @perserved-rebuild and @module-rebuild package sets are a big part of that. And there's also revdep-rebuilds when those fail to fix the ABI issues, whose use is becoming rarer these days since now portage can handle most of that stuff.

Besides that, you also have slotted packages, which allows different versions of a given package to co-exist peacefully in your system, so you don't have to worry if packageA and packageB need different ABI-incompatible versions of a given library. Not all packages can be slotted though, mostly because of upstream issues.

I run Gentoo with the stable branch, but only the graphics stack and some other programs (rxvt-unicode, Vim, ...) from the ~amd64 (development) branch. Works fine here.
If you need/want to run a partially upgraded system you may run into some blocks, especially with programs like Wine, since the transition to a fully multilib distro is not done yet.
Of course this depends solely on which parts you want to upgrade.

Gentoo used to be kind of difficult. It still remains more of a niche disto. It would have more uses for specialized installs but a person with some time and adventure in their heart could use it.

Common features of a distro include all what Gentoo offers. It offers a missions statement, target user and target systems. It offers ways to maintain the OS and applications. It offers support and help forums. It has ways to easily install apps. It also is current and features patches when needed.

Gentoo is great, portage is great and I highly recommend it. Gentoo is like Linux on steroids :P

I'm an Arch and a Gentoo user. Both are easy to install, as you already know.
gentoo is, as someone mentioned, what you make it. It can have the same software indefinitely, you can upgrade only crucial or all of your packages. Portage, along with some other tools, is awesome.

Is it for daily use? Sure, just prepare time for the firest few hours, two days at most.

My sugesstion: Try it, than report back.

That means if I want to keep existing version of software without upgrading it, I can keep it unlike Arch where upgrading all packages at once is recommended to keep it stable. (pacman -Syu)

OK I am going to install it.
Thanks all for the wonderful suggestions.

Of course this depends. If you have an older version of a library which you don't want to upgrade, but a software that you want to upgrade needs a newer version then you will be forced to upgrade the library (or in turn not upgrade the software that depends on that library).
In general, it is pretty safe to go with a stable Gentoo install, software is pretty new, but tested. If you really need something newer (with the downside of being less well tested) or older you can upgrade/downgrade on a per package basis, as much as possible with regards to dependencies.

On gentoo even the unstable branch is pretty stable

Thanks all again for wonderful suggestions.

I have tried Gentoo Linux. It seems to be much easier for me particularly, much stable upto now and I think I have got the answer.
I can use Gentoo easily without any great hassle, except I have learned two important things in this regard,
First I should spend a good initial time in installing and configuring it, because I haven't configured wireless properly which led me to have "hang on suspend issue".
Secondly, I should better go with binary packages if available, as in case of libreoffice, it really took much longer time to compile, even much longer than linux kernel itself.

Gentoo is... well... really in a class all by itself when it comes down to it.

It's a very powerful distribution, if you can get portage to use the proper updated packages rather than ones out of date, and find an install guide worth reading (the handbook is good but sometimes vague). To be perfectly honest, I had an easier time with CRUX and B/LFS by comparison, but that's another topic.

Regardless Gentoo is very innovative and shares a lot in common with FreeBSD. There are hundreds of portage scripts for all kinds of packages so you should be able to get any package available for GNU/Linux.