Well I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about...What Gentoo is all about...

That's right I decided to install Gentoo via VirtualBox. Thank God for Virtulabox - Web browser open to Gentoo's doc page, I follow the pages of instructions and proceed, proceed and proceed.....Hours later(3 1/2) I have what they call a working Gentoo installation...a terminal window...I figure in about a day to a day and one half I should have a window system with some apps all complied and optimized for my system...Is it worth it? Is it worth the waiting, downloading, compiling? Why yes, Gentoo will introduce the willing and able Linux user to a whole aspect of Linux that's taken for granted. You'll glimpse the inner workings, you'll see how the machine is put together(well some of it)...

I think Gentoo would be great warm up for Linux From Scratch....Anyway I must be off Mp3Blaster and its dependencies are compiling/installing - all 53 of them...

Gentoo is about control and customization, whether you want or need that is completely up to you.

Certainly your first install will always be -by far- the longest one, usually not only due to compile times. Gentoo is basically an LFS with a proper package manager, which means that you get dependency resolution out of the box. The number of dependencies is greatly influenced by your USE flag. In LFS, doing ./configure --enable-foo doesn't resolve anything, you will need to install all the deps by yourself.

Anything requiring X will push a lot of packages, because X is no longer one single package since 7.0, which was the first modular release. In a basic Gentoo installation you don't have much, but the basic system, a working toolchain and the package manager, so every single dependency will need to be installed. Once you install a few packages the list of dependencies for new packages will magically become much smaller. Mainly once you've installed the first X app.

Hey, welcome to the pack! Gentoo rulz. Be sure to let us know if you have any questions. Also be sure to checkout the gentoo forums too -- the people there really know what they're talking about.