Hi! This isn't really a question about gentoo, but about you guyz...

I've recently tried gentoo and found the concept of portage (their package management system) very very impressing. For example, I wanted to install gnome (and everything required to run gnome, like X!), so I typed "emerge gnome" and portage downloaded, extracted, compiled and installed everything including all the dependencies. I was amazed, Same thing for mplayer: emerge mplayer, and even the win32 lib very in the right place, there was even a icon in my gnome menu! It was unbealavable... anywway

My question is: Who of you have tried Gentoo Linux?

And of you who have tried: have you switched back to your old distro?

I do use Gentoo and Slackware exclusively I found that Gentoo is more targeted for intermediate linux users, at least you must compile kernel before your system is live, and emerge is the project of the year I believe, even though there are switches in ./configure script that you might want to play with the concept of getting the source and compiling it without hassle is excellent, I was really not using it though , the machine is an intranet webserver w/o any development tools in active state, so if the need arise to upgrade apache or what not I just go to to dot orgs and compile it myself, sure I would never look back on anything else that isn't tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2 or tgz, and I like them both Slackware and Gentoo.

I tried gentoo, and wasn't terribly impressed. I would like a decent
update utility for Slackware (autoslack exists, but still needs work), but
getting a good, working system from the beginning is more important to
me than having a tool that constantly keeps me updated with the latest
bugs. . .

I usually rebuild my kernel right after install, since I always like to trim
that beast down to the bare bones of the kernel that I need.

<flamebait>
I've tried many different distros and have yet to see something that
impresses me as much as Slackware does.
</flamebait>

I tried gentoo and liked it a lot.That was 1.2.When I switched to 1.4 things got buggy.I don't know if it was due to 1.4 or the compiler and the way I set the CFLAGS.Anyway - since only about half of it was working ok I got rid of it then and stick to debian since - there I do apt-get gnome and it installs everything needed too without compiling for 12 hours.
I don't really see a difference in speed between debian and gentoo for normal desktop use.
The only thing that works a lot better with gentoo are my browsers.For some reason some sites (like this one) take forever to load with debian.
I'll give gentoo a spin again when I got a faster processor - with gcc 3.2 the time it takes to compile has become untolerable for me with a 900 mhz cpu.

I tried gentoo 1.4, but didn´t find any speed improvent´s in my work (yes i did set the compile options and used a stage1 tarball). I had to compile for 3 days before i had all up and running (pentium2 400 Mhz). And portege is similar to apt-get so that didn´t get me any advantages.
I like to keep my system up to date and i don´t want too sit and wait for my programs to be compiled when i don´t get significent speed improvements.

I always seem to get back to debian. It have a great packagesystem, and the right amount of system tools too have a fast, effective and secure computer.

Crashmeister: I Don´t have that problem at all, i used woody as baseinstall, and then used sid to install programs.

I gave Gentoo a try quite a while ago, and found that you really do need to have a decent internet connection to get anything out of it. Since I will only be on broadband for about 3 months, I'm not likely to try it again for a while. I'll stick to Mandy for my main rig and Slackware for my other computer that I do all my tinkering to!

I think that browser stuff is not a bug but some kind of feature!
I did several debian installs and its always like this.
I have to go and compile mozilla from source one day and see how that works.
Speaking of that - one great thing about gentoo is that since everyting is compiled from source all the libs are in the places where they are supposed to be and you don't have to search for dev libs and headers that might not be installed if you decide to compile something yourself.
But it does really take forever to install gentoo - the time it takes to download the sources is nothing compared to time to compile them.I think on my box it takes about 20 hrs. to go from scratch to kde.

It's cool to get everythings 2 cents like that!

I can't remember how long i took to install Gentoo the last time. I remember I let it run overnight(during compilation, didnt clock the exact time) and continue to build the system over a few days(of course I was doing some other work too)