[gentoo-user] Is Gentoo for me?

[John]

Hi folks,

  I've been using linux for about 12 years now, but only used DE's. I've got ADD in the 
extreme and have poor memory retention so trying to learn things 'UNIX' (command line and 
such) is just too difficult for me. I can do some command line stuff but nothing more than 
getting time from someplace to make my clock be correct, heh.

  I've been using SuSE/openSUSE now for all those 12 years but I'm becoming somewhat 
disgruntled with the direction I feel it's going (don't ask, it'll just get me started 
rantin' and ravin'). I've looked at Slackware, but the package management looks just a 
little bit more than I can try to handle at first without getting frustrated and scrubbing 
it off my hard drive.

  I've looked at a *LOT* of other distro's and too many use Gnome (I can't stand it, 
that's my opinion so don't try to argue with me to change), some are a bit too 
minimalistic and others too much like openSUSE is now - huge.

  I finally came upon Gentoo and for the past few days I've been reading and looking at 
things and so far it seems to be what I'm wanting to switch to, but here's my quandary:

  I'm dirt-poor and have only a dial-up connection. The Portage package management seems 
extremely nice, but will it be a problem for me to upgrade say just one package/app at a 
time? Will I be able to find a tarball of an app I want to try out and be able to build it 
like I would with rpmbuild (will it be as relatively easy as that)? Is there a 
'repository' of apps anywhere that I can go to to look and see if the app I normally use 
for something is there?

  There's probably more questions, but I best keep this short for now, lol. Thanks for any 
replies and help with these things and I hope I made enough sense for everyone to 
understand what I'm trying to get at.

  JB


-- 
I mean....if I went 'round sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint lobbed
a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!   -Dennis from Monty Python and the Holy Grail