Originally Posted by
nkedel
You've never tried Gentoo, then (which is itself a bit less control-freak-y than Linux From Scratch.)
Mind, there are plenty of reasons to prefer Arch over Gentoo -- I run both on different systems, as well as a some Fedora and CentOS and [ick] Oracle Enterprise Linux at work -- but if for a minimal default and a do-it-yourself approach to things, Gentoo is the pinnacle before it ceases to be a distribution.
I actually
have used Gentoo. The first ever Linux distro I used (circa 2003, I think...) was Gentoo, because I wanted to really get the feel for Linux and how everything worked. It took about a week to compile it on the ancient AMD K6 based system I was using it for at the time. (and it took me several tries just to get to that point, having had only extremely limited *nix experience)
Arch is a step back from the Gentoo level of control. It gives me
almost as much control, but it's quite a bit less work from the user required to get it running and keep it running. I think it's in kind of a sweet spot that way.
I use Ubuntu when I set up systems for other people since it's very user-friendly.