Just clear up the impression of the personal dig, I don't hate Gentoo. It's
interesting and amusing, and true to it's "ricer" image it's great fun to
tinker with and tweak, to solve those little puzzles it's always throwing at
you. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, and I enjoy it.
At other times, though, I require my computer to be a tool I use for work, and
I don't want to be interrupted and to have to spend two days tracking down
why sound failed _this_ time, just so I can have tunes while I work. (Or
worse yet, why X won't run when I need something that's in an X-based app.)
I think gentoo's advantages are mostly imagined and/or exaggerated. I notice
this is frequently from people who like to spread FUD about RedHat, or binary
distros in general. While I don't like where the RedHat distros are right
now, I think they're a very valid, useful, valuable way to do things if you
just need a system that does it's job.
Unlike a majority of the LUG members, I don't write code, for a living or for
fun. I know six mostly obsolete programming languages, and I can make
scripts do some pretty amazing things, but I don't code. That means that
some things that are important to coders aren't as important to me.
I mainly mean to advocate the good qualities of binary distributions in
general, and RPM based systems in particular. I mean to correct some of the
exaggerated claims so that people who haven't tried gentoo or an RPM distro
aren't misled.