Same here, around 8-9 years ago... on a laptop. Things would break all the time for me and it was hard to even use any vanilla kernels on it. It taught me most of my basic linux skills, and the forums were a treasure of information (before they took a dive, not sure how they are nowadays). I often had to boot Knoppix (livecd) to fix things.
It was a distro that invited a lot of experimenting and tweaking.
I've been running opensuse as my main distro now for a couple years. Great kde support, very stable, gets the job done. For servers I gravitate towards CentOS.
Oh yeah, gentoo's documentation was, hands-down, the best on the net at the time for getting your stuff to work (say, ndiswrapper for getting wireless working.) Their guides didn't really rely on gentoo-specifc features because gentoo doesn't really have features beyond portage, which more or less wraps gcc.
I just spent a few minutes looking through the gentoo doc again. Makes me really excited how good the community doc was - this is how it's done! [1]
It was a distro that invited a lot of experimenting and tweaking.
I've been running opensuse as my main distro now for a couple years. Great kde support, very stable, gets the job done. For servers I gravitate towards CentOS.