I'm proud to announce my return to the Gentoo colony with my acquisition of a dual processor dual core AMD Opteron 270 box. But it is not all gravy.
Normally I stay on the KDE side of the fence but my time spent in Ubuntu land has given me a new appreciation for the Gnome desktop environment. The Ubuntu team has spent a great deal of time and effort making Gnome and all the apps in the Ubuntu distro a seamless whole. In Ubuntu most of the time I couldn't tell where Gnome ended and the application began. I'm currently running XFCE 4 and if it wasn't so damn fast I would switch to Gnome in a heartbeat. But I'm finding it difficult to give up the instant response time of XFCE. It is really fast. Click on a button any XFCE button and boom! it opens instantly, no waiting. It is intoxicating.
Even more impressive is the startup time. Booting up to a KDE/Gnome desktop is like booting up twice, once for the OS and another for the desktop. With XFCE startup is a none issue. startx and 2.5 - 3 seconds later I'm completely in my desktop. My only real gripe w/ XFCE is it doesn't come with a built-in graphical calculator and I can't find a decent one in the portage tree.
Like I said before, it's not all gravy. The box's fans are loud as hell so much so that my apartment sounds like the tarmac of an airport as planes prepare for takeoff. Which means when I 'm not working I have to turn it off or else I won't be able to hear myself think. There are positives to this though. I can't hear my neighbors.
The walls in my apartment are paper thin and I've got probably the loudest most obnoxious set of neighbors. They are constantly fighting and yelling and banging on the walls. One of them has this habit of going into the hallway to talk on his cell and it drives me absolutely insane because the hallway acts an echo chamber to his already loud and irritating voice. Like I give a shit what he has say to whoever he has to say to. If I could get away w/ it I would do not nice things to him ;)
Wow! I have no idea how I got from talking about my Gentoo environment to piss and vinegar about my neighbors. I guess they really get on my nerves. Anyway, the bottom line is Gentoo is da bomb and I'm glad to back and now w/ my tarmac apartment my neighbors are a none issue so if something happened to them it wasn't me!
