I’ve been a decades long Gentoo user, but now I’m experimenting with NixOS as I’ve gotten older and value my time more. The 12+ hours of compiling when there’s a chromium / QT update is no longer a badge of honor. I haven’t fully converted though, Gentoo binary packages are working as an acceptable stopgap
In the future, you should look into using LVMs for your partitions. I ran into a similar problem recently where my /var needed to be increased - I was able to run a simple
lvextend -L+4G /dev/myvg/var --resizefs
to grow my /var by 4 gigabytes.Before I was using LVMs though I used a gparted live disk a lot