“As a Linux newbie, Red Hat Linux 9 impressed me. When that
excitement wore off, I jumped cold turkey into Slackware Linux. I
tried Ubuntu but it was too slow for my low-end desktop, a 32-bit
1.58GHz Sempron 2300 with 512MB of RAM and no swap file. By this
time I was a competent Linux user who enjoyed using the console. I
wanted to go beyond distros designed to be user-friendly because I
found them to be almost always slow on low-end systems. Gentoo
Linux’s speed, power, and many application and configuration
choices made it an appealing choice for me.“Gentoo Linux is fast because every installed package is
compiled for the user’s hardware. Most packages are source code,
but binaries are becoming more common and more popular, as they are
quicker to install…”