Once upon a time, I used to be a Gentoo user and made it a hobby to tweak my computer's operating system to be as minimalist and high performance as possible. It was great fun and I learned a lot about what was going on with my computer. I knew what each file on my system did because I had directly or indirectly chosen for it to be there. At one point I had five Gentoo machines compiling away.

In 2006, I found I didn't have time for this any more, especially since I wanted to spent time honing my programming skills, so I reluctantly decided to limit myself to one Gentoo machine, and for the others I would use Ubuntu in the most default configuration possible. The idea being that I can take any new (or old) computer, and within 20 minutes be completely productive, having installed Ubuntu and the extra packages I need within that time.