Time to throw up another post after lurking for months.
Linux User, I think you are being a little hard on the Gentoo distribution. Its not *that* difficult. I'm a linux midbie at best, and I've been able to get it up and running on more than one machine.
The 30+ page install manual is very straightforeward. You don't need to study it, you just need to follow it step by step. And nobody is going to use the whole thing. People only need to follow the parts that apply to them. An example is that the guild explains in detail how to configure both lilo and grub, yet users are going to use one or the other. In the end a typical user will only really use about half the guide. Most of the difficult parts of the installation deal with things that users of Debian or Slackware should know anyways, for example compiling the kernel, setting up networking, congiguring rc.conf etc...
Once installed, Gentoo is very easy to use. Installing new packages can be done with one simple 2 word command. Updating packages is done the same way. Its just as easy to use as apt-get. The differences between portage and apt-get are that portage complis everything on your machine from source, which takes alot of time. This way it can compile it according to flags you can set to tailor it to whatever your hardware is. Apt-get is very fast, but it pulls in everything compiled for a i386. Why use packages that run best on a i386 when you have a i686? So its kind of a trade off between speed and performance of the finished package. And who cares about speed, what if it takes 8 hours to compile KDE? Just start the install before you go to bed, it'll be all finished in the morning. Gentoo gives you more control over your system than any other distro. Not only do you have complete control over what packages you install, but also how they are compiled. That's hard to beat.
I really don't like Debian. Granted, it has its place, but I just don't think its good for a home OS. Debian is going to be the most thoroughly tested and perfected linux there is. It is the most stable, and in a situation where I needed a machin that was perfectly reliable that have to have 100% uptime at all costs, sure, I'd go with Debian. Its the perfect Linux for a corporation's mission critical server. But for my home computer, I want up-to-date packages. Debian has to be one of the most outdated Linuxes there is. Thats no fun. The only way to get up to date packages with Debian is to use its testing packages (Woody). But then if your going to use those, you lose all the stability that Debian prides itself on, so what's the point? And then there's the issue about debian being slow. Its about as slow as redhat, which is even slower than Windows. That's no fun either. And if one is to complain about Gentoo's difficulty in installation, Debian is not going to be a cakewalk either. Slack at least can compete with Gentoo (almost as fast, even more up to date), but I think Debian has to be one of the dullest distros.
