What? GentooLinux? What's that, you ask? Well, first, if you don't know what Linux is, let [Google] tell you all about it. GentooLinux is a Linux distro in which all packages are (typically) compiled from source. It uses a system called portage to calculate dependencies and download and compile everything needed. This has a number of advantages, the biggest of which are:

Gentoo is also very up-to-date. You can be guaranteed that only a little while after a new version of whiz-bang-thingamajjig is released, a simple emerge sync followed by an emerge whiz-bang-thingamajjig will have you up and running. And Portage is actually exceptionally good about not breaking things. I've been running the same install (on this machine!) for over three years now, and it's just fine. My machine is very up to date, and I don't really think I'll ever need to re-install, except for some kind of catastrophic disk failure or something.

Check out their [homepage] for more information, or maybe look in the [forums]. I'll put more here about GentooLinux as time goes on.

And indeed, time has gone on:

Recently, I've actually been using RedHatLinux a bit (don't worry, I still run GentooLinux on my DualAthlon and use it every day) because I'm working on a project at work based on RedHatLinux.