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?