I never heard of gentoo studio. Im looking into it now and it looks like a decent possible alternative.
I want to run a DAW like Reaper, with multiple midi tracks playing through vst instruments. I had no problem doing that on windows 7 with my 4th gen i7 processor and 16GB of RAM, so my 8th gen processor should be able to handle it. But it's a "power saving" processor that actually benchmarks very close to my old 4th gen, so I do want to keep the OS and desktop environment light.
Edit:
I see gentoo studio isnt listed on distrowatch, but you can get it theough his site.