Gentoo was the first distro I successfully installed and used long-term, and was probably how I learned as much as I did about Linux. Installing Gentoo was hard, and keeping it working was even harder, but the Gentoo Wiki was by far the best of any distro (at the time) and I found it useful for dealing with problems in other distros.

Earlier attempts at running Linux back then (early 00's in high-school and college) were always on fairly unsupported platforms, like the family PowerMac G4 or my first-gen MacBook Pro that I got for college. Yellow Dog and eventually Fedora never worked quite right on the PPC-based Macs, so those installs were always short lived. On the MBP I tried Ubuntu and Fedora and there were always some driver issues that would leave me without a trackpad or wifi or the ability to sleep or something.

I had heard about Gentoo from some college friends; it had a reputation for being hard to install, but none of us were aware of the memes. There was some wiki or reddit post or something that described someone with a fully working linux install on their MacBook Pro using Gentoo that involved configuring your own kernel and messing with something called makeflags. It took a few tries but I eventually got it completely working, at least for a few months until I decided to update something and it broke again.

More important than having a MacBook Pro running Linux in college, though, was a deeper understanding of how Linux and computers in general worked. You get your hands dirty with the install process, especially if it's your first time. You learn from the cycle of breaking stuff, reading docs, and fixing. It turns out this is at least how I learn stuff.

While the MacBook Pro ended up running only Mac OS X for most of the rest of college, I did install Gentoo/PPC64 on my PowerMac G5 and it ran that way until I moved to the bay area and didn't have enough space to bring it with me. This is what I would call my first server, and it mostly sat in my dorm hooked up to the campus network where it had a publicly routable IPv4 address (because my university had 2 class-b blocks). It was very good at serving... Linux ISOs... to my friends and family. I had some external drives hooked up via eSATA and enabled the then experimental BTRFS to use all the drives at once.

I would also use it as a workstation in my dorm too. It had an nVidia GPU, and nVidia obviously didn't have any proprietary Linux drivers that would work on PPC64 Linux, but Nouveau had just gotten to the point that it would support whatever card was in my G5 and that kindof just worked (after rebuilding the kernel, of course). This let me use AwesomeWM on the 22in widescreen CRT behemoth that was being thrown away where I worked (research compute lab) when I was coding in my dorm.

Eventually I graduated, but I had a friend that worked in a computer lab there and another friend who let me register my G5's MAC to their account, so I put my G5 in the back room of the computer lab and let it continue to serve. It was around that time that Minecraft started to blow up, and my G5 was the only non-laptop I had with a 64-bit processor so it could support tons of RAM, which it had. I found an ebuild for IBM's PPC64 JVM and was able to run a minecraft server that could support all of my coworkers that wanted to play on my server. It ran pretty flawlessly.

Now my Linux boxes run Arch, and servers will either run Ubuntu LTS or CentOS. Every now and then I'll do a Gentoo install to remember what it's like or to see how fast my gaming rig can emerge world, but I don't really use it for long periods of time anymore.