There's something to be said for the installer being a random liveCD and documentation for manually installing & configuring a system.
If you go though the handbook properly (and potentially enough times until you don't need it to install), then the amount of inherent linux usage and admin knowledge you can pick up is just phenomenal -for example I love the xkcd[1] even if it stopped applying when I started using gentoo.
I would expect a gentoo user to be comfortable on the command line, which doesn't hold true for a lot of other desktop users. That said, isn't it immense desktop linux has gotten to the point where the barriers to entry are grandma level low :)
It's also probably fair to say that every userbase has it's vocal idiots...
[1] http://www.xkcd.com/1168/
I have never seen a gentoo users with any more knowledge or experience than ubuntu, mint, mandrake, etc users. They are in fact almost exclusively people who used a "noob" distro, then switched to gentoo to feel "advanced" even though nobody with any unix knowledge would waste their time with gentoo.
If you go though the handbook properly (and potentially enough times until you don't need it to install), then the amount of inherent linux usage and admin knowledge you can pick up is just phenomenal -for example I love the xkcd[1] even if it stopped applying when I started using gentoo.
I would expect a gentoo user to be comfortable on the command line, which doesn't hold true for a lot of other desktop users. That said, isn't it immense desktop linux has gotten to the point where the barriers to entry are grandma level low :)
It's also probably fair to say that every userbase has it's vocal idiots... [1] http://www.xkcd.com/1168/