ubuntu, sabayon, etc.

i've been thinking about trying ubuntu (or xubuntu) on my next machine. it seems to be the biggest fad to hit linux in a while, and i have to admit that my more geriatric hardware has a hard time keeping up with gentoo updates. and packages like checkinstall give me hope that i will still be able to pick up scruffy-looking hitchhiker software along the way. the best of both worlds, of course, would be a meta-distro built on top of gentoo. that way i could let somebody else build binaries for most of my packages and still grunge around when i want. i've read a little debate about how this could be accomplished, especially given the exponential combinations of useflag combinations. i lean toward the p2p approach, but i don't see anyone doing it yet. but apparently some people are working on distros based on gentoo, like the stupidly named sabayon project. maybe one of these will eventually be worth the trouble.