What's people's experience with gentoo?

it's a beautiful distro :)

I'm thinking of upgrading one of my boxes to it in the near future. This is a box I really mess around with, so how bleeding edge can I get?

well ... lets just say we have had ebuilds for kde, gnome, openoffice, and xfree sometimes weeks before it was officially released ... we also have ebuilds that'll pull packages from cvs ... how much more bleeding edge can you want ? :)

Is it easy to keep some packages at stable releases, and some at unstable, or is it more of an all or nothing thing?

at the moment you can run a stable profile which should be pretty stable or you can run unstable (and get all the benefits mentioned above) ... it isnt that easy to maintain a cross of the two at the moment, but portage-2.1.x should take care of that ...

I guess what I want is, a way of trying the newest stuff, but an easy way of going back to stable when I'm horrified with how buggy the newest stuff is.

its easy to do that, but after the new emerge you may have to do some trickery to keep portage from re-emerging the stable version ...

Also... for the stable releases... how secure has the distro been as a whole?

we have a list of all the GLSA's we've ever released ... we release a GLSA as soon as a bug has been identified and fixed ... we then bump anything security related out of the tree and mark the latest security enhanced version as stable ... for the people who want a system that *only* upgrades security related packages, then we're currently developing a system for that ... again wait till portage-2.1.x to see that ;) -mike ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - NetZero HiSpeed! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month -visit www.netzero.com to sign up today!