There's an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:

Linux Airlines

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Gentoo is still very much a "You had to do what with the seat?" distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.

Does Gentoo have something special that other distros do not?

Isn't there a Gentoo installer like with Arch?

Nope. That's the "something special". You do it manually with the help of a very well written handbook and learn a great deal about how an os works. IMO a great experience.

Gentoo is the epitome of RTFM. It is beyond the Arch install in "complexity".

Gentoo is basically arch but built around everything being compiled locally. There isn't to my knowledge any "Gentoo-install", but if you can manage to install arch manually it should be quite similar. Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.

You can get Gentoo up and running pretty quickly by following the handbook. From memory it's easy to miss one or two clear instructions because the styling of the handbook can add more eye-catching weight to the explanation than the actual commands. So be sure to re-read areas where things don't seem to working out.

Gentoo also has a binary repo if you don't plan to stray from whatever installation profile defaults you start off with.

I can't confirm a simple server install of Gentoo is somehow more lean than any other distribution.

I've used gentoo-install with success previously although I don't know how up to date it is.

Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it's meant to be even more lean on resources.

True and false; the "something special" in Gentoo is that you can tailor it to fit to your needs, and as far as I know no other distro comes even close - maybe the now almost defuct Funtoo. The "it's more lean on resources" always seemed to me like a strawman people don't like it came up with to diss on Gentoo.

The point of use flags is to make it so if you don't want to print, every package that would otherwise pull in CUPS as a dependency can be compiled without it. Stuff like that.

Gentoo also has a good system for handling multiple concurrent installs of different versions of some packages, e.g python.

If there's software you want to install from source that uses automake it's pretty simple to build your own package for it.

Very much a system for doing things your way, and a good way to learn linux IMO. To that end, no there is no installer, but the process is not that complex. Boot a live USB, partition and format a drive, download and extract a base system, install a kernel (there is a fits-most-needs one available now), install a bootloader. Reboot into your new system and continue installing what you need from there.

"Install Gentoo" is a meme, not life advice. With Gentoo, the installation process gives you good insight in to the internals of Linux systems and compiling (almost) everything from source is interesting, but won't produce noticeable benefits for average users. Especially since updates take some time, what with compiling the programs again. Gentoo is a great distro with a fantastic package manager, but unless you're an enthusiast or a serious hobbyist, Don't Install Gentoo.

The installer is the handbook.

USE flags are freakin' awesome.

It can let you install two different versions of a library.

You can install the binary versions of some big packages like firefox.

Edit: while USE flags are generic, you can also set specific per-package flags.

Frankly i found the Gentoo handbook much easier to follow then the arch wiki at the time I tried both. Just compiling everything takes a while to do.

The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just that's the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you're after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.