Gentoo was the first distro that I used full-time on the desktop. It was my distro of choice through most of college, running on my trusty (albeit excruciatingl

Gentoo was the first distro that I used full-time on the desktop. It was my distro of choice through most of college, running on my trusty (albeit excruciatingly slow) Fujitsu P-2046 laptop. This laptop (really one of the first netbooks) had an 800 Mhz Transmeta Crusoe processor and 256 MB of RAM (later upgraded to the maximum of 384). Needless to say, software installation and upgrades were extremely painful. A larger package (X11, OpenOffice, Firefox) would take over a day to compile, during which time the computer was only somewhat usable. Those were the days. I've been mostly a Kubuntu user since then, and have enjoyed having my software installations be constrained by network and disk speed. I've also enjoyed not having things break on a regular basis (though Canonical has really tried to emulate that functionality at times).