You could start from a later stage, I think they had a mostly binary stage 3, and emerge was generally solid, albeit slower due to the compilations. So at leas

You could start from a later stage, I think they had a mostly binary stage 3, and emerge was generally solid, albeit slower due to the compilations. So at least once upon a time (10+ years ago) there was this option of just using it as almost another regular distribution. Slackware on the other hand... (I say this is in a bad way, and I think it's changed since; for Slackware for anything more complex you had to manage the entire dependency tree yourself, and it was a pain in the neck for anything not part of the not-that-many-regular-packages; nota bene: for the "beaten path" Slackware was more or less just another Linux distro, but the "beaten path" was quite narrow).