What would I want to keep at the end of a few months? Good question. I don't use my laptop a whole lot, its mostly used for when I go out on repair jobs. I'll have it with me so I can mount drives to back them up, format them or so I can troubleshoot issues online or download drivers and the like. Also I'll bring it to my buddies place for music, movies, etc... Really what I'm trying to get out of all the distros I try is to learn something new. I have my laptop to experiment with and that's what I'm aiming for.
Experiment, have fun, learn something new. This
Nevertheless, Gentoo has one thing most Linux distros cannot offer as readily: out-of-the-box PXE and TFTP server setup. If you've been wanting to learn more about bare metal provisioning (a useful skill), Gentoo is the place to start. There is nothing quite as rewarding as the first time you trick one computer into installing a setup on another computer.
sounds interesting. Would you care to expand at all?
Gentoo takes care of a good few parts more than Linux From Scratch, which is the ultimate in learning and I should've mentioned it earlier. One piece that it provides is a compiled set of preboot execution environment tools. The short explanation for PXE: it's a server listening for mewling, new bootups on the network. You can only have one PXE server per subnet. The usual configurations involve a PXE server listening for servers that just received their IP addresses from the DHCP server (usually your router in a home network) and running from LAN boot. PXE chills them mofos out and hands them to the TFTP server to download installer files. My day job involves tech support for a server automation product. One thing the product does is provisioning, and it uses a set of PXE files from Gentoo to install on bare servers.