No hurt feelings meant, and I agree that Gentoo can be a good system and can be at times faster, but I seriously could tell absolutely no difference in stability and speed between Gentoo, Arch and Debian(stable or unstable, TBH), the way I set them up. The effort needed to get to a Good Gentoo install is astronomical compared to a good Arch or Debian install. At the end of the day, its all linux. I just prefer typing pacman -S whatever and having the program just work without tweaks or compile errors. When I get a hankering to compile something, 99% of the time its already been done and is on AUR (yaourt -S whatever and edit the pkgbuild to your hearts content).
I have to agree with Piru on Gentoo being a terrible choice for a first linux. learning that way was foisted on me back in the day, but then I spent every tuesday in a LUG meeting learning what the hell I was doing. RPM hell is a thing of the past (honestly!), there are .debs for just about everything you'd want to use -- anymore its more of an issue as to which Desktop environment or window manager you use.
