Just for the heck of it, I setup a virtual machine with QEMU and installed Gentoo Linux in it. Gentoo is the distro for uberhackers – no fancy installers here; you do all the setup manually and you compile everything yourself (including the kernel) so you decide exactly what’s included and what’s not and what compile options to use. Thus, it’s an ideal distro if you’re trying to make a really lean and mean install. Packages come from a FreeBSD-inspired packaging system called Portage and you use an intuitive Python-based tool called emerge to install packages. Packages are downloaded as source code and compiled on your local system, which is either fantastic or a pain in the butt, depending on your perspective.

For me, it’s a bit of a pain to do all of that stuff manually when there are great distros like Ubuntu that make some compromises but get you a well-performing install with a great desktop and a minimum of effort.