The packages on your system are there because you want them to be . Not necessarily . Tons of things are built with hard systemd and other dependencies even if the program itself doesn ' t technically require it . If you replace your init system , you ' re still stuck with systemd skulking around even though you ' d like to kick it to the curb . But that ' s probably just a binary based distro problem . Pretty happy with Funtoo so far . It ' s like Arch but Archier . Lots of people introduce gentoo and funtoo with You have to compile all your packages yourself and that ' s technically true but that makes it seem like you ' ll be running . configure make make install all day every day when really the only difference you ' ll see installing packages is USE flags and long install times while it compiles it all for you . But yeah the AUR and documentation are pretty great .