[Lain]

I'm currently running Pop!_OS at home, IBM redhat at work.

great so far.

but for my home use, I hate Pulse Audio.
it's interfering with my efforts to get my old linux games running, and I'm giving serious consideration to either gentoo or arch for OSS4 support.

Funnily enough, Pop! was allegedly designed with gaming in mind. Weird that their support really isn't great 
I'll only suggest gentoo if you have a REALLY good handle on linux. Compiling your kernel is easy, but manual partitioning/installing, compiling all your packages from source tarballs with CFLAGs and learning the entire Portage ecosystem is a completely different hurdle.

If you don't have any familiarity with BSD, I'll recommend you try that out first, since lots of Gentoo was inspired by the way BSD does things (ie. package management and modules.) Arch is a little more user-friendly (babby's first headless distro) but it's also complete CIA shitware so I haven't touched it for a few years. Systemd is a bitch, let me use OpenRC for f*** sake.

I run Debian 10 Testing personally. They say you're better off using Stable, but Testing has been absolutely great for me. I have never once had it crash or have a single bug that was enough for me to notice. 

I do prefer Ubuntu, but Ubuntu crashes too much. It's sad when an LTS version of Ubuntu is less stable than the testing version of the distribution it's based on. 

@Lain: Seems like a good system! I would love to self-compile, but I lack the know-how and comfortability of it. What made you decide to self-compile your kernel?

Debian testing was my saviour. You're right, everyone discourages you from using testing/rolling release on the forums and everywhere you turn, but I also don't like being five versions behind on packages just because they're not considered """stable""", whatever the f*** that means. It really f*** me over when Qt stable was on like X.9 and I needed like X.13 or some shit, since there were tons of deprecated or new functions between those releases and packages like LatteDock were taking advantage of them. When packages are pushed to the Debian repos, it's because they're considered to work fine (or with minimal bugs.) There won't be anything completely broken because if it were really that bad, the devs wouldn't even be able to run it themselves.

Compiling your own kernel is easy as f*** as long as you know how to use make and how to mount your EFI/boot partition. Do it like once or twice and you'll have it down, the worst part of it is just figuring out which modules you need for your specific hardware, and doing that research will probably eat an hour or so.

Mainly decided to do it because of Systemd. Shit has parts of it that haven't been updated for like three years and every gov't in the world probably has exploits for it. All proprietary, doesn't respect freedoms. But because it Just Werks™ and because every popular distro on Earth was pressured by the CIA to include backdoors, it's become standard and I can't stand that. I have a complete hatred for the AlphabetBoys© (CIA, FBI, ATF, GCHQ, any fiveeyes shit, etc.) and I don't want them poking around my computer, so that really narrowed down my candidates to Slackware, Gentoo, MXLinux/AntiX, and a few more poorly-maintained distros. MX looked cool so I gave it a shot and the install script they provided hosed my machine so I f*** it off and went back to the list.

Tried Gentoo, installed fine and I slowly built it up with kernel modifications, then realized how bloated everything else seemed in comparison. I don't need fancy software suites and whatever else is packaged in the OS, along with all the services for kernel modules, drivers, spyware, etc. and if I build it all up myself (with the help of a little C programming,) then I can optimize the shit out of it. Less than 100MB RAM in headless mode, only around 170MB RAM in idle in Desktop mode (X+dwm+compton+feh) and I can heavily customize each one of those options to make my desktop look exactly the way I envision it.

That's another peeve I have about people who claim Linux is '''customizable''' or whatever, since those are the same people that only know about XFCE, GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon and MATE, and their version of customizing is just installing a theme some other nerd made lmao. Seems a little hypocritical if you don't go beyond that.