As far as multimedia goes, i only use linux for my dedicated MP3 player. My entertainment center handles everything else. As far as gentoo goes, it is one of the most optimized distro's out there. Going from slackware to Gentoo let my server handle 16players over the 12max slackware would handle without hardware bottlenecks. Its a celeron 500@533, 256mbRAM and it also acts as a internal network file/printserver and a web/FTP server at the same time that its a 16player TFC server. Under Redhat and windows it would peak out at 12players even without the server daemons going.

And i hate the fact that redhat defaults to a GUI instead of a Command prompt!!! And portage kicks the shit outa any other package management tool out there. Compile time from a Stage1 install on the server was about 3 days to get the base system running. Then another 2 days to compile X, KDE, and Mozzila.