Also Free BSD has something like Emerge....Actually, Free BSD has what Gentoo came from, one simple command to download and install a package of your choice and all dependencies.
As a matter of fact, I was thinking of switching to FreeBSD for a while, however I have devices like my video card and my nic that I do not think are supported (Radeon 9600SE and Atheros wireless). If I am wrong about that, I may give BSD a shot, however I would have to research it some more.

//Edit: Woot! FreeBSD supports atheros cards, and I think the fglrx drivers work on any platform that can run X. I'll have to try BSD one of these days. Thanks for the idea, gore!

Now you must die.
I by no means meant to insult Slack, I find it is a great distro (and I prefer it magnitudes over RPM-based distros). I just wasn't working like I would like it too, and so I switched. What you prefer in a distro is your opinion, and therfore your bussiness. I'm just sharing my experiences with what I find to be a exceptional distro.

Install swaret and run swaret install <package>. I did that with xine-ui and had a fully working version ready to play DVDs without problems (it even did things like creating the /dev/dvd symlink for me).
I did try out swaret on Slack. I have had a few bad experieces with it. For one, it trashed my X installation three times, which may not be it's fault rather packages that overwrote some libraries. Also, a few packages I installed (prime example: The Gimp) plain did not work. The dependancy checks swaret performs all checked out, however when I went to run it I received error messages about unresolved symbols in a few gtk libraries. I used swaret to upgrade those. No effect. I futzed around some more, nothing worked. I downloaded the source tar ball and compiled it. Worked like a charm! Note that the packages I installed are from the mirrors in the default swaret.conf (official Slack mirrors, right?), and I am sure I configured it properly.

As someone once pointed out to me - by the time you've done all those optimisations your machine might run 5% faster, but it'll take you 10% longer to get there.
It is not so much a issue of optimizations. The problem is that precompiled software has not worked for me in the past (see above). The speed improvement is just a bonus, and a nice one at that. Also, with my lean and speedy gcc, the 10% longer seems much shorter than you'd think!

If you feel I make good points, try Gentoo. If you don't, consider trying Gentoo. You just may like it!