A Gentoo installation might be fun, but it sure as hell isn't worth it, both in time and effort. Broken audio, broken video, broken stability. A broken kernel that doesn't recognize the hard drive or the network interface. And half a week to compile the fucking thing and it's still not done. This is not the right distribution for me.

A working linux from scratch sort of thing (I'm including Gentoo in the list) is pretty hard to get right but absolutely sublime once you do (if you have the time).

I guess that's one reason Arch is so popular, it has a good balance of low level config and ease of use/OOTB performance/stability.

(I wonder how many "btw I use Arch" folks just use defaults and how many actually take the time to do in-depth customisation till the kernel level and so on)

@RememberMe the building itself is not so hard, PKGBUILD ftw, the hard thing is to be up to date with aur packages..