Well, this is neat

I've got a working Gentoo system. I feel like I've gotten the hang of Portage, the USE system, logging and configuration.

Is it faster than other Linux distros? I couldn't tell you; I didn't arrange for any meaningful benchmarks. Not that there is such a thing.

Is it faster than my other box? Well, sure, but it has 2.5x the bogomips and 4x the RAM.

And all that compiling? Well, I can rebuild my entire OS overnight, so that doesn't even really get in my way.

Why Gentoo? I got sick of running an OS that with every upgrade, and where those In The Know reinstalled the new version rather than upgrade. And I'm not talking about Windows. Also, I have a processor (AMD Phenom X4 9650) that has a ton of features that aren't being used by most distributions--even 64-bit ones--that I wanted to see what it felt like to take advantage of them.

No, I wouldn't recommend it to most people. Heck, I don't know if I know anyone I'd recommend it to in the Linux world, just because it requires a significant amount of low-level knowledge to get working. Sure, there's a nice tutorial to walk you through chroot, mounting proc and friends, configuring your kernel and installing grub--but if you don't know what you're doing, screwing up in that installation phase is easy to do and difficult to recover from. And the first couple times you start X and discover it ignoring keyboard and mouse input are sure to be interesting. (hint: configure portage to log out those elog notices and then read them.)