Gentoo is a very advanced distribution which is not designed to be easy to use. It is probably easy enough to use once it's installed, but seeing as a reasonable install with X, Mozilla, etc, takes at least a day of computing time on a fast machine, it's not a piece of cake.

On Gentoo, everything on the entire system is compiled at installation time. Some items, like the kernel, only take a relatively short time to build, but the heftier things which are still necessary, notably gcc, X and mozilla, take an absolute age.

There is also a strong probability that somewhere along the line you'll find a package which FAILS to build, which may need a knowledge of C, C++ and/or gentoo's build system to fix.

It's a very clever system, but I don't use it because I like my box to *WORK* - and not take hours to set up a basic command-line-only system (I use Mandrake despite having used Linux for 8 years)

I would really recommend that newbies to linux get the other distros going first, it is probably also quite useful to have a 2nd working linux box during a gentoo build (espcially for 'net access because you will need to download stuff; if your main box is halfway through a build and has no networking, it can be difficult)

The gentoo people have made it as easy as possible - for a source-code only distro.

If you're an experienced developer, have some time on your hands, and have another linux box on your LAN, go for it by all means. I know a couple of people who've done so, and it does seem very nice.