Gentoo vs Arch vs Gobo

[CocoAUS]

I'm a busy man with not too much time to try out all sorts of new distros, but I've been wanting to give something new a try. I was hoping someone could give me a comparison of Gentoo, Arch, and GoboLinux, including (but not limited to) their package systems, which is most up to date, how things like desktop environments are handled (metapackages?), etc.

Thanks!

[ThinkBuntu]

I'm a busy man
Then you might want to go with a less time-intensive distribution, in my opinion.

[MoxJet]

Arch doesn't require much tweaking. I didn't find it difficult at all, compared to the confusion that can appear with gentoo. Compared to Ubuntu installation, the only difference is more options, and text based GUI...
The installation is very, very quick, and then to pacman Xorg and Gnome doesn't take long time at all...
I got my system up running like my Ubuntu does (xorg, gnome, nvidia, samba, webcam, mounting/grubbing, network, ssh, alsa, apps: gimp, pidgin, amsn, wine/photoshop7.0, gnomebaker, rhythmbox, ooffice ) up in well... less than four hours. And that is mainly reading the arch wiki...
Great stuff, lots of fun, good luck!

My gentoo installations has taken forever and I haven't successfully got my nvidia to run... I shall try again now though through the confidence boost after Arch...

[kellemes]

Arch doesn't require much tweaking. I didn't find it difficult at all, compared to the confusion that can appear with gentoo. Compared to Ubuntu installation, the only difference is more options, and text based GUI...
The installation is very, very quick, and then to pacman Xorg and Gnome doesn't take long time at all...
I got my system up running like my Ubuntu does (xorg, gnome, nvidia, samba, webcam, mounting/grubbing, network, ssh, alsa, apps: gimp, pidgin, amsn, wine/photoshop7.0, gnomebaker, rhythmbox, ooffice ) up in well... less than four hours. And that is mainly reading the arch wiki...
Great stuff, lots of fun, good luck!

My gentoo installations has taken forever and I haven't successfully got my nvidia to run... I shall try again now though through the confidence boost after Arch...

Could have been my words..

The Arch Way (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way) gives a good impression of this little distro.
I tried them all over the years, including Gentoo, great control, too much for me since control=responsability and hard work sometimes.. I'm laizy I guess.
I want it simply (google "KISS principle"), fast and uptodate.. and man, is Arch up to date! It's a rolling release distro giving you the luxery to have a brandnew system every time you "pacman -Syu".

Good luck.