I think I spoke too soon...

[faulkner132]

regarding Gentoo.

I had Gentoo as my only OS for 3 weeks and for everything I needed to do, it seemed, I had to scour the message boards. Some of the posts by newbies having the same problems as me, seemed to be answered in a quite condescending and definitely less than helpful manner as well. Not all, mind you, but I did get a sense of annoyance with newbies in their forum... just my opinion though.

All I wanted was Apache 2, MySQL 4.1, and PHP 5... and to get my CD Burner working.

I think this article sums up my frustrations with this distro:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12129

So this past weekend, I wiped it and put on Ubuntu 5.04. I read a lot of good things about it... and they were right. Out of the box, it detected all my hardware (no compiling ATI drivers or ALSA mixers then manually editing the config files) and is immediately accessible. My 3 week excursion with Gentoo definitely has helped me though... I can navigate pretty quickly, but the problems are minimal and the forums are infinitely more helpful.

Again, this is one person's opinion, but Gentoo just wasn't for me... too much time required that I simply do not have. Don't get me wrong though, I did learn a tremendous amount in the little time I spent with it. I'll see how my experience with Ubuntu goes, but so far I have not had any problems and can do everything I need to.

[kilgoretrout]

I think your comments are pretty fair although I'm sorry to hear people were not as nice as they should be on the forums. Gentoo is really not designed for newbs and the annoyance with newbie type questions apparently came through on their boards.
In general, for someone coming new to linux, they are better off with some of the mainline newbie friendly distros like ubuntu, fedora, mandriva or suse.