Try installing Fedora. It ships with a ton of drivers, which is really handy for computers with weird hardware (i.e. laptops). Gentoo is not, from what I understand, a distro that you want if you're just interested in tossing it on your computer and having it work 100% right away.
I stared out with a Slackware distribution of Linux 1.2.13. At the time there was no loadable module support. If you so much as got a new printer, you had to recompile the kernel. Got a lot of great experience from that, such as "don't forget to enable ELF support".
Now that I run and administer a bunch of Linux servers for a living, I've come to appreciate having everyting Just Work. Oddball NIC? No problem, Fedora probably has drivers for it already. Need to update the boxes? ssh into everything, do an "up2date -i", make sure nothing's broken, get on with life.