> invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) tha

> invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) that those nasty corner cases are actually where the rewarding part is. The progression of distros for me was, ZipSlack (fit on a 100MB Zip Disk), Red Hat, Mandrake, then back to Slackware once I actually had a real decent internet connection, and I can say for sure that dealing with those naturally occurring corner cases was a lot more fun than dealing with those "it's packaged, but for a different version of RedHat, so it won't work on your Mandrake install" Eventually I switched to Debian and was able to just stop caring about that stuff for the most part until something was too fresh to find a package. (I'd run Unstable, and everything was either packaged already or the vast majority of the dependencies were already packaged.) I don't know if there was any tangible reward from learning to build Enlightenment, and a full stack of graphical libraries underneath, but at least I did get Enlightenment from it. (!!)