Pacman has always been kind to me. Portage, on the other hand, crippled my beloved X60 after a full system upgrade even though I was only a few weeks behind. I don't recall the precise issue but if memory serves it was some sort of circular version dependency that I was unable to resolve. I was a 19-year-old l00nix nublet so I'm sure it was my fault but I've never had so much trouble with a distro package manager as I did with Gentoo's.