Gentoo Vs. Slack? and why no Gentoo forum?
 

Hey everybody. I was just poking around the Gentoo site and it looks like a pretty interesting distro. So obviously, my first reaction was to come here and see what people had to say abou it... but to my surprise, there isn't a Gentoo subforum in the Distro section. Weird. Any reason for this that anyone knows of? Ok now to my real question...

How does Gentoo compare to Slack? I've been using various distros (Mandrake, SusE, etc) that pretty much do everything for you. I just decided to learn Slack, and in the last two weeks I've learned 50x more than I ever would have known using the hand-holding distros. Not to say that the hand-holders are bad, but I'm one of those people that gets bored with a distro once it is configured and working properly. Heh. So the switch to Slack was really satisfying. But now that Slack is configured, I'm looking around again (I guess you could call me a distro whore). One thing that really struck me about Gentoo was the emerge update feature. From what I can tell it is fairly similar to swaret. To tell you the truth, I haven't tried swaret, and I'm wondering how the two systems compare. Is it worth trying Gentoo, or should I stick with Slack and try out swaret?
-Kris

This comes up an awful lot. Have a look at the stickied thread about the SuSE forum in Linux-Distributions. But also....watch this space.

As far as hand holding goes, Gentoo has 3 stages to setting it up - totally compiled for your system (stage 1, the longest install) to a "normal" install (stage 3, evrything comes from the disk. Read the handbook on the Gentoo site for deatils. But yeah, emerge/Portage are similar to swaret and apt-get, so if you enjoy compiling from source you may as well stay with Slack.