I know, but Gentoo is by far the most interesting. - The others feel like a downgrade/hassle from Ubuntu (I love unity, 'pretty okay' is not good enough). Tried Debian (which we use for servers) but had problems with my labtop, Suse I used before Debian, Fedora/CentOS ok but has the 'wrong packet manager', Mint, mmh, another fork). Maybe Ubuntu does some compromises but I don't see pits.

If you've got the time, Gentoo is very rewarding indeed.

I used to use Gentoo, but I figured Arch follows the build-your-own philosophy and has the added benefit of not having to wait for everything to build all the time.

I like both distros, but would you say there's any significant reason to switch back? Noticeable speed/stability difference?

Gentoo did fork udev, but I'm honestly fine with systemd for my desktop.

I like USE flags and disabling at compile time code I don't want. Keeps dependencies way down. Fewer packages, leaner system. I don't mind compiling. Hell, on my Ivy Bridge, compiling/emerging most packages is faster than apt-get in Ubuntu!