Do keep up.

Really missing the point, that guy. People say Gentoo's about performance, about customisation, about stability... personally I find it more stable than any binary distro I've used, although far from perfect.

The real reason to use it, of course, is that it's fun. I wish more people would admit that.

I love that site.  I only wish there were more sites similarly debunkig the previaling myths and puncturing the egos of other overinflated distributions but for now I will keep chuckling at the Linux Despair pictures
http://www.livejournal.com/users/alanhorkan/3445.html#despair-linux

I dont care about 'optimisations' but Gentoo's package management is great. I have found it so much better than using RPMs.

i've used gentoo for ... 2years i think.

now i'm using ubuntu.

:)

what i liked the most in gentoo was not the possible speed increase or things like that, but the USE-flags system.

here is a USE variabled that a friend of mine is using:

USE="X gtk gtk2 moznoirc moznocompose moznomail mozsvg cups usb -java -perl python dvdr acpi -svga samba -gnome dvd wifi bluetooth noantlr nobcel nobeanutils nobsh nocommonslogging nocommonsnet nojdepend nojsch nojython nolog4j nooro noregexp norhino mozdevelop -encode live network mmx mmx2 sse sse2 tga apache2 bash-completion -fortran real -xmms gd dvdread wifi -arts utf8 xosd unicode"

this for example means, that the mozilla packages should be built without irc support and all the packages without xmms perl and fortran support, but with python support.

this is very convenient for example to cut out java support, which would otherwise bring in tons of additional packages.

also very good is the way gentoo manages the "needed" packages.

basically, in gentoo you say which packages you need, and those will be installed along with their dependencies. so far it's like the binary-packaged systems, but:

for gentoo, the list of packages you want to have, and the list of all packages on the computer are 2 different things.

the list of packages you want to have lives in a text file somewhere in /var/lib/....,
and contains stuff like:

openoffice, gnome, abiword, eclipse, xmms, python.

why is this good?
because when you need to do for example a reinstall, you simply backup this file,
and after the reinstall put it back, and tell gentoo to update everything needed.

and you get all the packages you used before.

in ubuntu for example, i would have to backup the list of ALL the packages on the system. this is quite inconvenient, because for example if a dependency was changed between two versions of ubuntu, then my package list is invalid now

i hope this all makes a little sense ;)