[clue-tech] Taking the Gentoo Plunge?

[katanacb at comcast.net]

Thanks for the info, from everyone who has answered so far, erspecially from the ones who have used Gentoo for years and continue to use it.   I was hoping not to start a distro flame war like you see on OSNews or Slashdot :).  Yesterday, I burned the 2007.0 release, got the base system installed / recompiled last night, and to be honest  X-windows compiled while I was getting ready for work this morning.  So, I don't think that the total compile time, if you put it end-to-end, is going to be as bad as I thought.

BTW I have an AMD64 3200, 2GB RAM, lots and lots of disk space (most of it RAID), and an NVIdia 7800 card.  LIke someone pointed out in a reply, I'd really hate to do this on something like a 500Mhz P3 or something, I can see the whole process taking days and days.

<asbestos suit on>

Part of why I'm looking at Gentoo is because I have a 64-bit system, and I'm just unhappy with 64-bit releases in general.  Yes I know, 64-bit is new to the desktop, and even windows didn't support it that well, but IMHO it's been around long enough that the issues I've run into over the last few years should have been solved by now, but they just aren't.  Specifically, I've run into 2 problems, no matter what the distro, and I'm hoping that gentoo will solve those issues for me.   (1).  Performance.   SuSE, Fedora, RHEL, (K)Ubuntu, you name it ... all of them perform MUCH slower on my 64-bit machine than their 32-bit counterparts.  Some of them take eons to do some things like open up konqueror, fire up firefox, or start openoffice.  My old Thinkpad T-30 was always MUCH faster doing any of this and easily beat the pants off my home system.  For the life of me, I don't know why it's like that.  I've tried to figure it out, googled till I have carpal tunnel, re-compiled kernels and 
tweeked hardware, and still things are slower (and I'm not a Linux newbie, I've used ot since RedHat 3)  I know hardware can be the cause sometimes, but on every distro out there?   (2).  64-bit support on most distros is just sub-par IMHO.  On most you have to go through un-natural acts to get things like flash, java, mplayer + codecs, etc going .. and Gentoo looks attractive in this regard (and before you hit reply to this message, I'm sorry, running inside a chroot [debian / ubuntu], forcing an architecture [debian / ubuntu], or running 32-bit and 64-bit side by side [Suse, Fedora, RHEL -- it's like I have 2 systems installed on my box and not 1] when you only need a FEW things to make it work ....just isn't my idea of a solution here). Gentoo simply installs a few *-bin things and some compatibility libraries ... seems a lot more elegant to me.

So, while the hurdle of install looks like it's tough (and to be fair, it's not tough, it's just time consuming in the sense you gotta wait for things to compile.  I'm certainly not sitting in front of my computer waiting for this to finish, it just runs overnight or during the day), I think that once I get things up and running I'll be happy with it.  So far the base system boots light years faster than any SuSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, or any other 64-bit release could ever dream of .... so at least that part of my concern with other distros has been alleviated.

</asbestos suit off>

Now back to my cherub-like demeanor :)

Again thanks everyone for your replies ... I felt they were pretty objective vs fanboy-ish which is what I was hoping.