Gentoo

I want to get into linux and was thinking about starting with gentoo. Is it touring complete?

In 2007, where nearly everything is modular, compiling every damn package of your system is stupid. Not that bad, just a waste of time. Install a binary distro and compile specific things that needs to be patched or things like that if you want to. Debian and Archlinux have tools to do that. Or FreeBSD.