I have been using gentoo as my primary os for more than 2 years, recently switched to Ubuntu Mate. Few things that made me do the switch is the lack of common packages in the gentoo ecosystem, long compilation times.
I like the control and amount of customization that can be done with portage, but then I was spending way too much time on the default configurations which are decent in a distro like Ubuntu.
Decided to go with Ubuntu Mate. Mate Desktop Environment is a fork of gnome 2 and plays pretty well with window managers like xmonad, i3 or other tiling window managers.
I have modified my xmonad configuration to work with mate-panel, I have installed xmonad-log-applet and was able to pipe useful info into it, heres a link to my xmonad config .
