What I find appealing about Gentoo is its documentation. One of the best documentation on a Linux distro. Arch is very well documented too. I switched to Arch from Fedora and happy with it. But on one of my netbooks, I plan to use Gentoo, in spite of the scary tales of huge compilation time. I checked out Slackware. Its documentation is sparse. I can conclude that it is not for non-expert users like me.