[clue-tech] Taking the Gentoo Plunge?

[katanacb at comcast.net]

Ok,

I'm thinking about taking the Gentoo plunge, and I've read *lots* of information about how difficult it is to setup (or not), how time consuming it is to setup and administer (or not), how patches bork the entire system (or not).  I'm not afraid to setup Gentoo on my system(s), I've used linux for years and years, but I wanted to get some sort of idea from local guys who actually RUN the distribution what their experience has been like.

If I do this I'm going to do it on 2 laptops, and 1 desktop (which doubles as a fileserver for things like MP3s, etc).  I prefer KDE to gnome but I can be converted.  I've most recently run Ubuntu, SuSE before that but I've used pretty much every distro out there over the years.

So, for those of you out there who run Gentoo, what's your experience been like?  Are the rumours true?  I've downloaded the recent 2007.0 release and I can tell you that the live DVD seems to perform better than hosted systems on my machine (I know it's strange, but it's true) and I did do a gentoo install 3-4 years ago, but just got frustrated after borking my install a few times.

Cheers,
Chris