[jayofdoom]

I always tell people this:

With Red Hat, Anaconda is the installer. With Ubuntu, ubiquity.

etc ...

With Gentoo -- YOU are the installer. This means you have to be ready to perform -- more or less manually -- many of the tasks automated in other distributions. I sorta see this as the same as a tutorial level in a video game: you learn how to read and follow the wiki which is essentially the key to success in Gentoo.

[M95D]

No, I don't agree. That would be Slackware. I guess you never used that one before... It doesn't even do dependency management.

Portage/emerge is very much automated and once you set it up it runs updates with just a confirmation, unless you feel the need to tweak something.

[jayofdoom]

Slackware has no package manager or installer. It's just an extra step removed.

I didn't say Gentoo has no package manager (it does; and it's great!)