Same for me, I loved the ability to customize things and was constantly re-building packages. But the real thing is that it is what made me comfortable with the

Same for me, I loved the ability to customize things and was constantly re-building packages. But the real thing is that it is what made me comfortable with the command-line and linux as a whole. I'd used Debian quite a bit before Gentoo but I always just "used" it. If something broke, I did the windows thing and re-installed without truly understanding it.