I'm glad you're willing to take up the challenge and go through a manual Gentoo installation following the handbook. It's not the easiest start and usually I wouldn't recommend it to newcomers, but it's probably easiest to troubleshoot. Especially after neither Kubuntu nor Ubuntu worked and after the previous issues with Gentoo this is a big plus.
Let me also give you a word of advice on other distros, in case we can't make Gentoo work with reasonable effort. This may seem a bit rash, but I don't know at what point you might give up and in any case being prepared for plan B might help you. The point is, while you'll find enthusiastic supporters for just about any distro, none of them works perfectly for everyone, due to different hardware and personal preferences. Thus, your best bet is to try as many of them as possible (preferably using live CDs
). Although I do see your point in setting yourself an "ultimatum" of one more distribution, I doubt this is the best approach to the wealth of choice available and I'd strongly advice you to keep trying - subject to the time you can spare, of course. In any case I'd really regret to see you go with the impression that Linux in general was a complicated and non-functional mess.
