Daniel Lawson wrote:
Since gentoo is a source based distro (when you emerge a package, portage downloads and compiles the source for you), it is very easy to create your own ebuild (the gentoo package tyoe) if there is a package you want that's not in one of the repositories, or you want a newer bleeding edge version than currently in the repository,
One thing (thats already been mentioned) is that Gentoo teaches you soo much more about the "inside" of the system so that when you need (even though its very rare, since portage is normally right up with the play of releases - and all but the smallest packages aren't in it) to manually compile somthing - it normally doesn't turn into a scary "EEEP" moment. And no more fetching the install cd when small things go wrong and (say) x doesn't come up, like it used to be when I used RH. Also, another thing thats really neat is that packages can have multiple versions - with the newest/unstable packages masked so that - for general users who just want a working system can automattically have the stable version, but then crazy people who want the newest of everything very simply can. Another thing thats great is the smart init scripts which are really logical. </rant> I'll shush now...