That ricer link was hilarious, thanks. Somehow I've missed it all these years.

I keep using Gentoo mostly out of inertia; I understand it, and don't have to mess with it much. My systems remain current, and I don't break them... um, very often.

A very long time ago, when I was running Mandrake on a tiny Pentium-II system (kids, ask your grandfathers) I spent a week installing Gentoo. Holy cow, that was a laborious process - but there was a surprising and obvious performance benefit at the end. That conditional compilation business, where I could excise stuff like spellcheck, qt, nautilus, support for scripting languages I didn't care about - really made a noticeable difference on my limited systems.

Since then I've spent some money and gotten some decent hardware, and I don't notice the bloat in my systems so much. My useflags have become much less restrictive. Gentoo keeps everything current, and if something new tickles my fancy I can simply emerge it and a few minutes later it's there - with it and its dependencies tailored to whatever useflags I still keep.

So Gentoo works for me. (But my brothers run Ubuntu on my recommendation - they're cupholder-next-next-next-finish kind of guys.)