Yeah, Gentoo and Arch are both good (or were when I last tried them, several years back).
Daniel Robbins is also working on new Gentoo kernels and portage trees (and has a _ton_ of Linux documentation/tutorials) over at http://funtoo.org
Daniel Robbins is also working on new Gentoo kernels and portage trees (and has a _ton_ of Linux documentation/tutorials) over at http://funtoo.org
I used Gentoo back when they still had regular release numbers instead of dates (1.2 I think) and stage 1 installs. Back then the docs were complete and extremely comprehensive and the Gentoo Forums were amazingly resourceful. The distro and the community have slowly degraded in quality since drobbins left. (This is not necessarily related to his departure.)
Anyways, it was great for learning. Before that I tried Red Hat and was confused as hell. I couldn't troubleshoot anything. With Gentoo I constantly broke things but was able to find out how to fix them relatively easily. I quickly built up an understanding of how everything fit together.
Maybe Gentoo is still useful in this regard but it certainly is not what it used to be.