Yo,
Several distros such as Ubuntu, openSUSE, or Fedora Core are pretty n00b friendly and desktop-oriented. A lot of optimization must’ve gone through into these distros. Binary packages and nifty package managers are features. Where it hurts or matters most is when you want customizability in the “Gentoo sense” 🙂
Take for example a typical make.conf
you have flags such as USE, CFLAGS, and so on. One of these (which gets automatically highlighted red by vim is LDFLAGS ). MS Windows XP’s GUI et al feels a lot snappier compared to Gnome on my box. After I set the following LDFLAGS and re-emerged world, I’ve started to notice that my Gnome doesn’t suck as badly as it used to. I’ve posted this on the newsgroups (intranet) and people have asked me for benchmarks. But, although I didn’t do any (forgot actually :P) I ‘feel’ a sense of life flowing back into my system.
A lot of googling told me that the Ubuntu developers have also done something similar with their packages. There is an article on LWN that explains LDFLAGS a little. There are a couple of threads on Gentoo Forums.
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--sort-common -s -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,-z,now"
Make sure you go through the man page of ld for self-satisfaction.