Most of you can stop reading right now ;-) I can see that people seem to like Gentoo for different reasons. Here's what attracted me go Gentoo:
I'm not a Windows convert. I started using Linux before Windows really made its mark. I remember when most people ran 1 or 2 Windows apps and everything else ran in DOS (especially games). I started using Unix at my university in the early 90s. I loved it. For me it was like DOS on steroids. I'm a power user, and Unix was powerful, very customizable, and did things you could never dream of doing with WinDOS. I remember thinking "if only I could run Unix on my PC..." Enter Linux. My first distro was Slackware, around 1994. Slackware is one of the first distros and was so named because it was intended for "slackers" who were too lazy/inexperienced to install Linux from scratch and needed a nice little installer. It's ironic that today Slackware is considered the "difficult" distro and Ubuntu could be considered "Slackware Ultimate." Initially for me, being a newbie, Slackware fit in fine. But one of the problems I had with it was that software updates didn't come fast enough, and updating the distribution was usually a re-install as opposed to an update. I'd typically find myself installing a very minimal Slackware base install and pretty much everything else I downloaded and installed from source into /usr/local. I was already used to compiling from source from my Unix days (I remember having to manually edit Makefiles before we had tools like ./configure) so none of this intimidated me. But the old software, package management and upgrades (or lack thereof) made Slackware difficult to manage. I tried Red Hat (and briefly Debian) but none of them really satisfied me. Then I found out about Gentoo. It was awesome. I could do all the low-level stuff I did with Slackware (and more) yet get package management *and* upgrades were a no-brainer. And the power! Gentoo doesn't get in your way and it's hard to find something it can't do. I also love stage1 installs. Good stuff! I hope Gentoo doesn't go too far from its roots for the sake of becoming more popular or appealing to a different/wider audience. Not that I don't welcome changes when they're needed/helpful, but if it goes against Larry's fundamental philosophy* (and mine) about what makes Gentoo a great distro then I'm likely to oppose it. * Larry the cow: see http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
