http://www.archlinux.orgi think i am in love.

very fast (boots up faster than ubuntu and slackware plus everything feels snappy like gentoo), no need to compile everything like gentoo either, yet everything is extremely optimized for at least the i686 platform. the installation routine is a bit more involved than most other distros, but the best part is that the distro doesn't have a bunch of unneeded services by default. you start from a base system and build upon that.
the package manager, IMO, is better than APT. plus the "arch linux build system" is well done as well, i guess it's like ports in a sense? you browse to a directory and type "makepkg" to compile an archlinux package, and then install it with "pacman."
yeah. overall, i love this distro. i went into a distro hopping spree yesterday (hey, i had time to kill,) and i ended up trying out vector linux (which is based off of slackware 10.1), slackware, and ubuntu breezy badger (extremely unstable, btw.) i ended up settling with this.