I have decided to check the Gentoo distro these days. I want to try it on the laptop. From the first look (of universal LiveCD): fancy, fast, small.
I decided to install it and this is what I really not used to anymore – a sequence of lots of commands and operations for the installation. I need to format the disk (with fdisk) then extract lots of archives here and there and then even compile the kernel by hands (although there is some genkernel utility, the manual recommends doing it manually!). Too much stuff to do and the only thing that keeps me continuing the installation process is a very good documentation (just read the steps and do exactly what you are told to) and the hope that after all these customized compilations the system will be faster and more comfortable – will see :)
On the bad end I will get some experience with Gentoo myself and put Fedora Core 4 back :)