I alccidently wiped my machine.. so I decided to go with a gentoo install. I have to say.. gentoo is right up my alley. Stage1 install on a 1ghz AMD machine took me about 24 hours over three days to get all my apps going. But it is a fun distro

I think I am going to retire slackware... but I am not sure yet.. I need to reinstall gentoo because I accidently used teh wrong processor.. I thought I had an athlong-xp and that is was a i686... but I actually had just an athlon and it was i586

But thats what I get for not remembering what the heck I built 3-4 years ago.

good luck with your new distro... but gentoo is not for me. i can't stand long hours for installing the app.

Would you like a medal? Maybe this should be in Success Stories.

I've used Gentoo and initially it's great fun, the compile times wore me down though and I ended up giving it the flick.

I like gentoo because I love the portage system and I had fun trying to get it to work and I was rather proud when it was up and running.

I love gentoo! I have built a gentoo webserver, gentoo LTSP server, gentoo file server for my school and have a gentoo desktop which I play music and watch video on... the portage tree is always up to date with a simple emerge --sync and you learn more about linux then sticking behind a gui install.

I can't understand people who give up Gentoo purely because of compile times. . .

Just how often do you install new software?? And even when you do, how often do you actually need it right now?? And even when do you need new software right now, what's wrong with just installing the pre-compiled binary instead of compiling it??

This isn't intended as a flame, you understand. It's genuine confusion. Why is compiling something such a problem?

It is

Simply because I don't need to. Arch is generally kept as cutting-edge as Gentoo, if not then it'd never be too far behind and that's okay by me. Every time I log in I run a pacman -Syu which is the equivilant of emerge --sync. At the most, an update will take me 5 minutes. Gentoo, it could take anywhere from 5 minutes to half a day. That's just my logic though, everybody is different which is why there are so many distos getting around and they all have a userbase

Fair enough. I leave my emerge sync running overnight, so it really doesn't matter to me how long it takes