I tried Slackware, Mandrake, and half a dozen other distros when I got into Linux around 2001. None of them resulted in a working system for me, and I had no luck figuring out how to fix any of them. (e.g. getting my sound card to work on Mandrake)
I tried Gentoo and it took a long time to install (stage 1, for Gentoo geeks) but by following their documentation and wiki articles I finally had a working Linux system. Which I promptly broke by doing something like `chmod -R 644 /usr` and had to subsequently re-install. Doh! Anyway the point is just that Gentoo was the best Linux distro for me at that time because it worked, had good and extensive documentation, and a helpful community. Learning a lot about how a Linux system is put together and how it works was basically just a bonus. In hindsight it was a really important bonus.
I tried Gentoo and it took a long time to install (stage 1, for Gentoo geeks) but by following their documentation and wiki articles I finally had a working Linux system. Which I promptly broke by doing something like `chmod -R 644 /usr` and had to subsequently re-install. Doh! Anyway the point is just that Gentoo was the best Linux distro for me at that time because it worked, had good and extensive documentation, and a helpful community. Learning a lot about how a Linux system is put together and how it works was basically just a bonus. In hindsight it was a really important bonus.