You're right Bleys, it's not for everyone I guess. I don't think the deciding factor is newbness versus non-newbness though, it's a desire to be non-newb versus a desire to know Linux well. If you know nothing about Linux, but you WANT to know a lot, Gentoo is good for you. If you're a Linux master but you don't want to have to mess with it a lot, Redhat is for you. That's why I feel OK still recommending it for complete Linux newbies too. There are a lot of complete newbies on the Gentoo MB who post how much they like Gentoo once they gave it a try.