I find it interesting that people think you need to use distros like gentoo and slackware to be an advanced user... You can do serious CS work in Linspire if you choose. (acruxksa, I know your post was tongue-in-cheek)
Gentoo is a great distro to learn some basics on, but it's ill-suited as one's primary desktop machine- it's just too much work to get the things that ubuntu does out of the box. It's really only good for servers and production machines (audio/video workstation, DVR, etc).
The most useful things I learned in gentoo was how grub worked. Previously, whenever the mbr got screwed up i'd have to reformat. Once you get past setting up the default system in gentoo it becomes much less useful as a linux learning tool. You ultimately spend more time learning gentoo centric things. Things like rcupdate and the genkernel will confuse you on other distros.
Gentoo is a great distro to learn some basics on, but it's ill-suited as one's primary desktop machine- it's just too much work to get the things that ubuntu does out of the box. It's really only good for servers and production machines (audio/video workstation, DVR, etc).
The most useful things I learned in gentoo was how grub worked. Previously, whenever the mbr got screwed up i'd have to reformat. Once you get past setting up the default system in gentoo it becomes much less useful as a linux learning tool. You ultimately spend more time learning gentoo centric things. Things like rcupdate and the genkernel will confuse you on other distros.
