Last week I had some undiagnosable problem at bootup and I decided to just backup my home directory, /etc and some other key files and reinstall Gentoo from scratch (stage 1). It turned out to take longer than I remembered, but it has proven to be well worth it.

Having run Gentoo before (for a few months now) I knew to set up the /etc/make.conf file with optimized USE tags. Basically, I put in everything I knew I would need and disallowed the rest. Being a fan of KDE my tags looked something like this: USE="kde kdeenablefinal qt -gtk -gnome".

Eleventy-billion hours later I had compiled my system (with only two commands, thanks to Portage). I noticed immediately when I started X that things were different from before. Window response was much faster, applications loaded much faster, and I had more free RAM. Sweet.

I’ve been looking into every distro that’s featured on DistroWatch for a while now and I just can’t imagine giving up my Gentoo. Now, if the Portage tree contained Yast2 for system configuration this would be a flawless OS.