I love gadgets. Especially electronic gadgets for all kinds of things. I have lots of them. And like to talk about them. I am creating a 'book' on my site that describes all my favorite gadgets.
Transition to Gentoo has been very smooth without any major issues. I like Gentoo. It is designed with developers and system admins in mind. The community is very much like Debian.
After getting my machine up and running a couple of weeks back, I created many partitions on my 80GB harddisk to install various Linux distros and compare them. I want a distro that is user friendly and easy to use as a desktop. Since this machine is going to be used primarily as a desktop for Photo Editing using Gimp (preferabley 2.0) and playing music and browsing net, I wanted a distro that could detect all my hardware and setup all the network shares (using NFS), CUPS printers, SAMBA printers, SAMBA shares etc, without having to edit any configuration files by hand.
I have used various Linuxes for my home server. This home server hosts my bapat.net web site, my @bapat.net mail server and our intranet (yes! I have 5 computers at home, 6 if you count the office laptop) file server. I have almost always stuck with RedHat (and now a days Fedora) with the exception of a brief stints with Mandrake in the beginning and Debian some 1.5 years ago. The problem with Mandrake is that it is too desktop oriented and too much on cutting edge for my taste. It does not have stability that is required by a server (even if it is for casual personal use). The problem with Debian is the exact opposite. They are too slow to update to the latest technology. Debian's 'stable' releases are at least 12 to 18 months behind the rest of the distos in terms of technology. Though I don't want to be on the bleeding edge, I don't want to be left out. That's why I'm thinking of moving my home server to Gentoo Linux.