I'm just looking for some opinions... What do you like or dislike about each?

Sort of like apples and oranges, isn't it?

I like Knoppix live CD because I can use it right off the CD on almost any box. It's real handy for diagnosis, even of Windows machines.

Dislike, well all I can think of is I dislike the computers with winhardware and it is slow since it runs from CD unless you install it. I haven't installed because I don't really care for KDE, I just use the 3 virtual terminals available and don't bother with x except to show curious Windows users.

Gentoo I like because it's fast, lean and got what I want on it. It is a great teaching distro, because you have to use the command line some. I have more room for data if you don't count the portage tree and the distfiles. Well, actulally, I have more room on my Gentoo than my Fedora Core 1, even with the extra stuff.

Limitations rather than dislikes: You have to have excellent memory and cooling when you are compiling the system. For example, for fun I installed KDE on my Celeron 850 (512 mb memory) after I built my system and it took almost 3 days to finish.

Not too mnay opinions, huh? Or maybe it was moved to a place people don't browse to... These posts are below a ton of other things. I never knew there were indiviual posts down here until I did a search for this thread after it was moved!

I have tried both on the HD. Gentoo is a lot more work and takes a lot longer to get running. I find that the gentoo distro can become unstable after a few weeks if you are installing packages willy nilly. It is possible to recover, but for someone like me (intermediate?) it takes a while. Popular packages appear within hours of release, which is nice for bug fixes, but can be a problem if the package developers have missed something.

There are two install options for knoppix, so it really depends on that. The knoppix style (autodetect on boot) and the debian style (config files). I would only consider the debian style, as the security options tend to evaporate after reboot on the knoppix style. You lose a bit of the eye candy though. Boot from cd and copy to HD to get it back (or to check config files). The debian package tree is bigger than gentoo if you are needing obscure stuff, but it is not as bleeding edge. You are started with a debian sid base, which is really as stable as you need for home use.

As for speed, I don't know as I run kdm/KDE. If you are truly looking for speed you need to run a lighter wm/desktop on gentoo, but I only hear of the differences second hand. I have tried slackware with icewm in the past and I can attest to the much shorter boot time, which I imagine would be indicative of gentoo with xdm/ice. The computer I had then was different than the one I use now, so who knows about the response during use. You can turn off services in knoppix which should get close to gentoo speed, but mostly these just lead to longer boot and greater memory usage more than anything. The processor optimisation in gentoo is probably more relevant to longer jobs that you might run than to interactive work.

Right now I am on an Arch and Crux exploration. I might go back to gentoo and compare in a few weeks.

One thing I know is that Gentoo feels much "snappier" in Gnome than the same box running Windows 2000 Professionial, tweaked as much as I can figure out how, even while I am running a long hard compile (uncomment or set even higher niceness in /etc/make.conf).

I gotta do the Knoppix/Debian thing one day. I know I really like apt-get on my Fedora Core 1. I need more hard drives....