Why I can't recommend Arch or Gentoo

[Joseph C. Lininger]

I myself consider the lack of a live desktop to be a feature. I'm a huge 
fan of the distros that let me choose exactly what I want to have on my 
system, and which do very little for me in the way of installation. I 
don't like having stuff I won't use installed automatically. I have used 
both Gentoo and Arch Linux. I even ran a Gentoo server farm at one point 
which we built up from bare metal. These were production servers. I'm 
investigating Arch as a server distribution. I get nearly as much 
flexability as I do with Gentoo, but I don't have the long build times. 
If I absolutely *must* build a pacakge from source for performance 
reasons, I have the ability to do it selectively under Arch. I I've also 
run gnome under Gentoo, although I don't use Linux as a desktop OS much. 
I have been thinking of trying to get that working under Arch Linux, 
just to see if it can be done.

Does any of this mean I have a problem with those who choose to use 
something like Debian or Fedora? Of course not! It does mean I 
personally wouldn't use any of the more out of the box type distros though.
Joe