I also used Gentoo for many years before switching to kubuntu.<div><br></div><div>I loved gentoo, It was easy to maintain, highly configurable, but time consuming. </div><div><br></div><div>I switched due to the fact that I was working full time and going to school full time. I needed a system, that I could get anything going in 10 minutes, and without worrying about compiling in all the right flags, and then waiting. In Gentoos' defense though: Building most things from source (through portage) took just a little more time then compared to installing the binaries. (Most packages an extra few seconds. Big packages such as X and KDE took quite a while: 3 days for KDE on my PII system).</div>
<div><br></div><div>About the time I left gentoo, they were starting to introduce binary packages (like Openoffice) through portage which would allow you to just download a "everyday binary build of the package" for software that usually did not need extra config for most users. I don't know what happened to that though, if it is still alive, or if it really helps....</div>
<div><br></div><div>I now find myself loathing ubuntu, as it often makes me jump through some goofy hoops to get simple changes done for packages that ubuntu compiles the wrong way for my purposes. This is stuff at which gentoo excelled. </div>
<div><br></div><div>For example, I still have to recompile my laptop kernel do to fix a bug/non-standard ubuntu config in both ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 that does not allow my laptop power supply to be recongized. If I don't recompile, my machine laptop happily puts itself to sleep since it thinks it is only on battery power. It takes simple change in the actual kernel config, but ubuntu's kernel rebuild process is a nightmare.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I find myself yearning for the time when I can go back to gentoo. I have a feeling/fear I may wander among the distros for quite a while as none are perfect balance that I want</div><div><br></div><div>
Anyway, just my rambling 2 cents</div><div><br></div><div>Mike Irons</div><div><br></div>