My distro of choice: Gentoo

Let me start off by saying why i first came to use gentoo - I was lingering in the hackthissite.org IRC channel ,and there was some talk of live cd. Being quite inquisitve, I went and found the iso, before downloading it. It was prominently mentioned that it was based on gentoo, and thus, our relationship began.

It took me a long time to finally get round to installing gentoo, worrying about dual-booting and partitioning, but when I wiped my laptop, I decided I had nothing to lose. So a few hours later, I had downloaded the 2006.1 live CD and had it installed.

The first thing that hit was all the new things, and of course this would be the same in any distro. If you like learning, install linux! This made things difficult for me at first and took many hours to finally get my wireless working. But the satisfaction when I acheived it made it all worthwhile.

This brings me to what I like most about gentoo. It is most definetly an "expert" distro, and I am forever making mistakes. (I'm probably on my 4th install now) The best thing is when you fix what was broken, it is definetly the most satisfying thing I have done sat in front of the computer ;-)

I'm not going to bore you rambling on about how it optimizes things to your system and all the benefits of compiling every package yourself. The one point I do want to make is that you decide how things are. If you dont have mp3 support its because you left it out. Not because someone decided you might not need it. I like having that responsibility, even though it makes some things take 4 times longer than they might on a binary distro.

Portage is a great package management tool and makes it very easy to grab software. and with overlays, even bleeding edge software isn't out of reach. Compiz-fusion is now in the standard tree and the last time I installed it went without a hitch atall.

I hope I've given a bit of an insight into why gentoo is the distro for me, and maybe inspired you to check it out for yourself. If you have any first experience of distros you would like to share, then please feel free to comment away.

Until next time,

Peace

--------------------------

If you're interested, the hackthissite Live CD can still be got here
The gentoo homepage is here, and another great resource is the unofficial gentoo-wiki