[linux-audio-user] The best distro for music creation

The possibility of using and contributing to studio quality audio software is really what first sparked my interest in linux. So I installed Mandrake 10.1, because someone gave it to me and it sounded cool. Since then i've had a lot of fun with it, using their mm kernel and running jack with seq24 and trying to come up with something cool enough to use ardour for, and everything ran relatively reliably. BUT... The lan componets of the distro simply don't work, the USB plug and play is more like plug-and-if-i-feel-like-it-play, and the printer suport is also compleatly unreliable. So, just use mandrake for when i'm feeling musical and reboot to Micro$oft whenever i need to do anything else, right? well, that's getting old. So i took a friends advice and started playing with gentoo. After all, it's well documented. and it was fun writing all those config files and oh so neat to DIY, but then i tried to install Gnome, and after like a 7 hour compile that i can't yet figure out how to use i'm thinking, what have i gotten myself into... So does anybody out there have the best of all worlds? good free documentation, reliable hardware support, binary packaging, a fast audio kernel, and config files that don't get re-written by some user friendly script somewhere that would be oh so convinient except for the whole doesn't work thing? If your system works the way you want it too most of the time, i want to hear your opinion. gratefull, Brian