I luv this topic! :) Suffice to say, If we threw a bag
of M&M's on
the floor, everyone would grab a different (their favorite) color!
Hehe. Usually I tend to be quiet in these "Mine is longer than yours" or
even "What is the best Distro for xyz purpose" discussions.
Setting USE flags and the compile times are surely disadvantages of
Gentoo, but what I really like is the easy update mechanism and
(mainly) the fact that the repository really is huge and offers all
packages in recent versions. This is a major advantage over the
commercial and binary only distributions like SuSE or Mandriva.
Debian could be an alternative to avoid the compile times, but Debian
tends to be very slow in adopting new technologies.
Anyway, the optimal distribution doesn't exist. But Gentoo survived
longer than any other distro before on my machine :) .
Best regards
ce