Quote:I've a Gentoo user for 10 months. It's the most customizable (yet confusing) operating system I've ever seen. The benefits:

1. Start-from-scratch style. Gentoo installs almost nothing except the package management system (Portage) and the compiler (gcc) by default. You are given the freedom (as well as the burden) to install anything you want. Unlike major Linux distributions which favors a system that works out-of-box, and brings a lot of stuffs that I consider useless.
   
2. Powerful build system, which enables users to apply customized flags during compilation (it accelerate the execution speed, quite a bit), adding custom software (you can install a package from any source with a tiny custom ebuild, including the very risky ones), or apply patches. Gentoo is entirely a source-based distribution.
   
3. Rolling releases. No need to update between major versions.
   
4. Lots of documentations.
   
5. Comprehensive architecture support.
   

The problems:

1. Compilations take much time. For example, GNOME takes 6 hours or more on my system (and that's why I don't use it), and OOo takes 4 hours.
   
2. As a user favoring unstable packages I met different kinds of issues frequently. Fortunately most of them are easy to fix, and it improves my knowledge about the system.
   

Quote:If Arch Linux has a larger and more mature AUR, I would choose Arch instead, but currently I guess it's still hard to rely entirely on AUR for all packages...

The drawback of Gentoo is that you must compile, almost all the time, since even though Portage supports binary packages, I have not found any mature binary sources for Gentoo. Also, dynamic library update is a nightmare. I remember once I updated poppler on the first day to 0.16 and revdep-rebuild-ed 30 packages; then on the next day I found poppler 0.16 is masked, I downgraded poppler then revdep-rebuild-ed 30 packages again... Like what they said, Gentoo destroys earth and we'd better stay away from it. :D