(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I have got to say, Gentoo linux is easily the best distribution available, provided you're experienced with linux, have lots of time and can follow the handbook instructions, installing it is what trips up most users.

It features the portage package manager, which is similar to the ports system used for BSD. The portage system consists of two parts, ebuilds and emerge. The ebuilds system takes care of building and installing software, whilst emerge provides a means of using ebuilds, resolving dependencies and other issues. Gentoo is based around compiling packages from source code, optimised to your system with CFLAGS and the likes, so you compile the software for your system, not for the general public like binary distributions do which can result in performance increases and generally running better.

Another prominent feature of Gentoo is use flags, which provides a means of choosing what dependencies and features you want added or strictly do not want added to the software you are using/installing.
For example if you were running a server without the need for dependencies and things used for GUI's, DE's and things like that you could put USE="-gtk -gnome -kde -X" which would make sure you never installed anything to do with kde, gnome, GTK or X. Now say you wanted to install IPV6 support in all software if available you could add ipv6 into your use flags, to make sure you do get support for that.

It provides a very comprehensive handbook on installing and using it, which if followed properly can easily be installed. The only problem I have ever come into contact with gentoo is has been kernel panics, which has been completely my fault due to leaving out some vital drivers for my HDD. It also has great documentation on installing and using other things like Xorg if you need a GUI/Have a desktop system.

Another extremely great part of portage is that you can completely rebuild your system and fix problems with ease, say if you migrated from a low version of gcc to a new one and it broke your system, if such a thing happened with a binary distribution you would have endless problems but with gentoo a simply revdep-rebuild will fix just about any problems you have and if that doesn't work you can do emerge -e world which will completely rebuild everything.

In all honesty the only way you could setup your machine better would be if you spent an extensive amount of time using linux from scratch, making sure packages were up to date and manually installing and manually figuring out dependencies but that is near impossible and the Portage package manager is brilliant.

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Never used Gentoo, but I guess I'll have to try it out. My favorite has always been Debian.