Gentoo linux

After a long break, my linux passion has forced me to dirty my hands on newer (new for me! of course) distros again. My current linux box runs on Ubuntu and i am pretty happy with the Ubuntu UI and wide base of applications Ubuntu repository has. I do everything from developing my Java apps to video chatting on Yahoo to playing mp3s on my box and it takes all of 'em happily.

My goal this time was to get a good linux installation that can work on a minimal hardware without loosing much of the X features and good number of applications for everyday computing. After a lot of reading on forums and disros requirements pages, i picked 2 of them- Gentoo and Sabayon. Because i was only trying out a new linux, i preferred doing it on virtual machine. VBox from Sun is the best (freeware) i have ever tried out yet.

Gentoo worked pretty well on live CD on my VBox with 128MB RAM pretty smoothly. I really mean smooth performance because i've had the same experiments on Fedora, Ubuntu and Xubuntu also and compared to those heavy distros, applications did run faster on Gentoo with XFCE.

So, if you are looking for a smaller installation and ready to come out of the comfort of Xubuntu and do some learning, i stringly recommend Gentoo.