I have been using Gentoo exclusively on my desktop and ThinkPad for 7 months now and I reeeaaally like it. It's a rolling release distro but you're able to set your system to only use versions of packages marked as stable by default, then using a simple config file you can select which packages you want the newest, bleeding edge versions for. This allows you to have a customizable blend of stability and newness. With Gentoo, the package manager does have to compile your packages from source, but a lot of big packages (like Firefox or the kernel) have binary options as well, and with modern hardware most packages don't take very long to compile.