Gentoo, /sigh. That was a great part of my linux learning experience. I bought into the hype a friend told me about "you have so much control!", and effectivel

Gentoo, /sigh. That was a great part of my linux learning experience. I bought into the hype a friend told me about "you have so much control!", and effectively shot myself in the foot because compilation time was so slow (and I didn't yet know enough to use it well). The slow manual install process? I can't remember any of it, and would have to read a howto again if I had to do it -- but I think it went a LONG way towards demystifying things: everything was just user-editable config files and sources. There's no magic, and almost everything is something I can change with compiler flags. Of course, I now heart ubuntu and debian, because I tend to agree with the choices of most package maintainers as far as compilation options, and my computer is fast enough that I don't think I'd notice if my office binary were maximally optimized or not. ;) However, I might not have gotten here had I not been exposed to Gentoo and Slackware long ago.