OMG no one should even use Gentoo unless they're a full time developer. I used it (a I was using it on the PowerPC and it was the only thing I could get to work) and it almost put me off linux. I found that it's hyper sensitive to revision changes and demands a lot of interaction from you during updates so the least time I found I could spend doing updates was between 1 and 2 full days every couple of weeks.

If I did it more often than that I jut had to spend that long more often and if I did it less often I found that I would store up a headache as something would brake in the torrent of updates that would be near impossible to identify.

Don't do Gentoo (especially as a beginner).

Very good point - learn to use linux and learn how it works are different things.

If you need to study linux look up http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Sincerly on a second review of what I wrote I have to admit that just installing Gentoo is a very hard challenge for a beginner :)

I use gentoo on 3 computers and I do not spend more than some hours per week maintaining it, which is ok for me. This includes compile time, where I just wait for the process to finish and do something different. First gentoo installation was very hard, the two others were much more easy because I understood emerge's output better (emerge is the package manager). But gentoo installation is a one-time thing, once installed it gets upgraded forever.

I was looking for a rolling release distro and I got what I was looking for. Also: A little bit on the conservative side in deciding when to put a new version into "stable", which is a good thing (30 days without bug report are the default). And the best online documentation of any distro I ever used.

With rolling release, sometimes manual work is required on major version changes of an important software, but the necessary steps are documented in elogs. Manual edits in several config files needed when I want something different from default - yes, this could be better.

Gentoo can break when it is not updated at least every 2-3 months, because older versions of packages rotate out of the package tree and there might be no tested upgrade path from something-1.1 to something-4.5.

But to start installing and maintaining gentoo, one should at least have basic knowledge of where things are in a linux system, how to work with command line and text editors, and have a second computer with internet access for the installation guide.

It's just what I meant.

Again, I found Gentoo harder work than this. Like I say the upgrade system seemed to be hyper sensitive to changes in version so I found that supporting packages would be upgraded way more often than any other system I've used and many of these came along with unnecessary changes to config file that all needed manually merged. This would only take a couple of hours if it went smoothly, and was run regularly (i.e. every couple of weeks). However I found that all to often a serious change would result in a breakage or major change that would take at least a day to fix.

That being said the Gentoo documentation is excellent - I still use it today for particular issues. And I know for a fact that the work the Gentoo people put in help the rest of us Linux users as many patches to bugs happen early on with Gentoo before anyone else has started using the newer versions.

I also never found Gentoo to be anywhere near as fast as it is always reported as being, despite optimising where possible for speed. The scripts much of it was based on just seemed clunky. I have now though switched to Arch and very happy, much shorted compile times but with the same access to build software should you want it. Fewer upgrade issues and unnecessary updates. And a really simple script layout. All good things in my book that generally leave me with the feeling that my system isn't fighting against me any more.

And because I'm not using all my available computer time just to keep the system up to date I feel like I can actually learn more about Linux on Arch.

I learnt Linux with Fedora and now I do it for a living :)