Gentoo advantage? (was: [TriLUG] What distro do you use AT WORK on your SERVERS.)

[Cristobal Palmer]

> Gentoo gives much more control as to what is actually on, and running
> on, the box, and some of our configurations are fairly custom, and it
> fits well with that.

No flames, please. Honest questions follow.

Having never worked with gentoo, I don't understand where this extra
control comes from. As a debian and ubuntu user, I know that I can
download the source and compile something myself if I like. I found
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml to be lacking, as I could see
easy apt-get parallels for each of the "one command" actions listed.

I know that there are people on the list who are actively using gentoo
in production environments, so can one of you give a more complete
argument for why the customization is easier? Does a gentoo install
start out significantly smaller? Do those of you who use it know that
you would be compiling just about everything to begin with? Give me
some arguments that'll inspire me to give gentoo a shot on _my_ old
clunker laptop.

-CMP

PS. Nobody is using slackware in production? Yellow Dog? DSL? rpath?
Something I haven't heard of?