Quote Originally Posted by Citizen Bleys View Post
Also, Gentoo (or Sabayon) > Ubuntu. Ubuntu's nice, but not as nice as a portage distro.
I second that. Gentoo's the only distro that I've stuck with and consistently had installed over the past four years. Portage is probably the single best thing in any Linux distribution. But I would definitely recommend using Ubuntu at first, if only for a month or two, so that you learn the ropes of Linux. I'd hate to tell somebody to sit there and do an installation of Gentoo as their first distro.

My first Gentoo installation was good fun. I chose to install KDE and Gnome, and in a stroke of brilliance compiled them with -j1 and -O3 C flags and every use flag. Not to mention it was a 64bit kernel in the early days of mainstream 64bit processors (which means out of date and unstable packages even from the stable source tree), so it was all for nothing anyway. It took three days.