I actually just had my first successful Gentoo install. Compiling Gnome was... time-consuming, but the performance vs binary distros is definitely enviable. Fresh boot at idle on the desktop consumes only 560mb of ram on my machine, which I've never seen for what's usually considered a heavy DE.
The pain of compiling it on and old fanless something. Literally 30 hours later. But it did run mythtv... You kids got no idea the pains of compiling crappy capture card manufacturer's drivers into a custom kernel. We had to hack device ids into the kernel source to get video, now you guys just plug it in, dag gummit.