> My personal list of Distributions i have spent some real quality time with
> 
> Ubuntu/Debian
> Fedora/Red Hat new and old/Centos
> Suse/Opensuse
> Gentoo

You should take some time to look at Arch. While it isn't particularly
new (2002 first release) it is basically the ideal distro.

Packaging extremely easy to get your head around, and they have source
and binary mechanisms for package management to cater to any needs you
might have. They also tend to avoid patching upstream code, believing
that the authors of the software probably know their code better than a
packager.

makepkg is their source package manager, this handles source dependency
resolution etc etc... abs also provides you with a source tree similar
to /usr/portage ... while there are no use flags, you can edit the
PKGBUILD yourself. It also has a file to edit build optimizations and
the like.

pacman is their binary package manager, it is very well featured, and
supports most of what you'd likely expect. It doesn't replace config
files though, which you'll be familiar with via Gentoo. I think the tool
is called the same thing as Gentoo, but for some reason I can't remember
the name of it atm (using a different distro for beta testing atm)

It is a relatively small group of developers, but they are very active.
The community is also growing speedily and their wiki is very
informative. They do not however believe in things like marketing, they
aim to KISS and technical merits... not doing what it takes to gain
users.

You should definitely give it a trial run of maybe a week or so... I
think that is all it'll take to fall in love. I've been away from it for
only 3 days and miss it  :(

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