"The simplest difference between gentoo and binary distros is NOT that you compile your own. That is just a side effect. What is far more important is that you have the CODE, or rather more importantly, the HEADERS! If you EVER tried to compile a package yourselve on a binary distro you will have found that you first have to download a ton of headers, wich are often out of date, or you are using some weird binary. Simply put, if I want to compile a package on gentoo on my own I can do so by JUST compiling the package, I do not first have to download the package with the linux headers for my kernel, because the headers, and everything is already there."
>gentoo