[Lilux-help] FreeBSD, compile from source and Distributions

Hi all, I've had a very nice feedback on my previous question, so I'd like to take the opportunity to ask a question that's been bothering me for some time now. I've had some Unix exposure at work with AIX, and I wanted to have Unix at home to learn more about it. I started with SuSE, which was nice but too much Windows-like. Gentoo seemed like a geek thing, I found it too hard to start with. As Gentoo kept refering to FreeBSD, I gave this one a try, and I liked it very much. The one thing that annoyed me, though, was the fact that pre-compiled packages were hard to find, and the general answer was to compile from source using the ports system. I must agree that the result was always OK, but at the cost of hours of compilation for KDE for example. My personal preference would be the other way round: use precompiled packages, and compile only if they don't work in your specific configuration. This leads me to my first question: (1) Did you find any real advantage to compiling from source, except that you can tweak the result by using compile options -Dxxxxx? I then went on to look for something else which did not have this drawback. Finally, I've decided to give Debian a try, as it appears to have the best package system around - unless you believe that you should always compile from source, in which case Gentoo is probably better, although my understanding is that Debian allows you to compile from source as well. Thus, my second question: (2) Would you agree that Debian is the best distribution if compiling from source should be a fallback option, and not a must? I know this one is tricky, but I am also interested in what distributions you use and for what reason. Hope you've made it 'till here ;-) Regards, -curious PU