Fed up with trying to keep a frankenstein Debian-testing + hyper-unstable-custom-debs system up-to-date with the latest security fixes, I just ditched it on my laptop in favor of Gentoo, the latest fad distro popular with the uber-geeks. You know, the kind of geeks who gotta show the next geek up by custom compiling every single package on his system and wouldn't be caught dead using a mainstream, candy-coated distro. Anyway, after getting past some initial problems, I got it installed and working almost flawlessly out of the box.
I've installed many flavors of Linux on several types of platforms, from x86 to alpha and I've not seen a vanilla, precompiled kernel for a distro have trouble with the most basic of IDE hard drives. However, the default 2.4 Gentoo kernel failed to work with the drive in my IBM G40 in any way—nothing but IO errors. Their 2.6 kernel did a better job but was a bit of a learning curve for me, as I'm used to the dark ages in Debian, where people running stable shy away from installing such things. Once that was cleared up, most of the bootstrap install consisted of waiting.
Almost everything worked out of the box for me with little trouble. BBDB was a minor exception to that, failing to install. My only other complaint about Gentoo is a seeming lack of a centralized method for wireless card configuration. I found a custom ebuild for some wireless-config package that worked well, but it seemed like a step down from Debian in that regard. Otherwise, everything seems to work well with little to no custom packages, including Mozilla, Blackdown, and Newsmonster.
What's up with that, biznitches? I've got all my packages custom compiled and optimized for my hardware.