BitJam
Welcome koyote!
I’m an old Gentoo user myself, going back over 15 years. I’m just doing a fresh install of Gentoo to a new partition. I still have the chroot open and haven’t tried to boot it yet. Many things in antiX were inspired by Gentoo. Most, but not yet all, important things can be done via the command line. For example you can install packages with our cli-aptiX tool which is similar to Synaptic but based on the command line.
I got interested in antiX when I was looking for a fast-booting rescue system and (Gentoo-based) systemRescueCD had dropped the console frame buffers which was a real drag. The antiX distro still had them and booted fast so I jumped in to modify it so I could easily add things like zsh to the live system. We recently won a award for the best live system of the year although it was close and there not a lot of votes.
I hope you like antiX and stick around. If you want something more GUI-fied, you could try our sister distro MX-Linux.
[...] almost any English person would accept "bully" as a synonym for "Fascist". -- George Orwell (1944)