[safetyscissors]

Slackware was my alternative to Gentoo at the time. Gentoo was cool because it was all compiled, more efficient etc. That shit sounded good to me as a teenager. I remember one summer I had the Gentoo ISO all burnt on a CD-R and stayed up all night to watch it install and compile on my Athlon Thunderbird PC (My parents didn't spend money much on computers and I had to make do with stuff that I saved for with birthday money). I fell asleep on a bean bag and woke up finding that it failed to compile something. I had to resort to asking the main IRC channel and message board to help me fix it, but I didn't have time :) I was disappointed as a 14 year old. I then downloaded Slackware and printed off the installation guide at school. I followed it to the T and it worked. It was fun and awesome because it allowed me to understand how things worked under the hood and provided insights on how a linux system hung together. Those days in the 00s are gone but the memories are still there.

[intergalplan]

Gentoo on an IBM Thinkpad (IIRC a 900Mhz Celeron + 384MB memory) was my laptop in college. Aside from a few beasts (KDE or Gnome, for which you'd end up needing to have at least the libs to run much in X even if you didn't use those DEs, OpenOffice [holy crap, maybe the single longest compile?] and to a lesser extent Firefox) the compiling wasn't really that bad.

Only non-Apple laptop I've had where suspend-to-disk worked every time. I don't know exactly what the deal was, but the IBM firmware had some feature that took care of it for you if you added a correctly-typed, sufficiently-large partition at the right spot on the disk. It just worked.

[rvschuilenburg]

Hah, I have similar memories about installing Gentoo for the first time. I remember printing out the installation handbook on a ton of pages because at the time the computer i was installing it on was my only access to the internet.