I currently prefer gentoo. I started with Caldera, then Mandrake, RedHat, LFS, and now gentoo, with some Debian sprinkled in the middle. Debian used to be *the* distro of choice for non-x86 arches. Now it's probably approaching a toss-up between Debian and gentoo, although Debian probably still wins.
LFS was a fantastic learning experience--which is why I chose to use it for a while. Gentoo seems to be a very nice compromise between having to configure and maintain everything (zero package management) and only configuring what you specifically want to (portage is an extremely capable package manager--on par with or possibly exceeding apt in some features). As for compile times on my desktop--I just let it do that while I sleep so it's already a non-issue--but I rarely do long-running compiles anyways. (KDE updates at most monthly, and besides KDE no other packages take more than a minute or two tops anymore with CPUs these days.) While gentoo is most certainly primarily a source-based distro, it is more correctly called a "meta distribution" because you can very easily create a customized repo with binary packages optimized for a specific need for mass distribution. Give each one a profile name and now you have your own family of binary distros for each purpose in your network--all with full upstream package tracking via portage. At a prior employer I maintained two custom live-cd distros based off of gentoo, each for 5 different architectures--it really was a breeze. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
