i'm a newbie with alot of time on my hands due to a broken leg. i am supremely bored with tweaking windows, done it all so i decided to try linux.
i wanted e-mail, web browsing, office, and media players. plus a user friendly gui to help me orient myself, before i started learning.
redhat was good, and they throw in the kitchen sink, suse was noticeably slow on my system, slackware required too much configuration.
i'm using peanut linux, it is a complete linux, with the latest kde gui it comes with all the above.the name peanut is a turnoff isn't it. i downloaded the small iso, 87megs or so. and cause i don't have a cd burner, i extracted the files using iso buster.
made my linux ext2, and swap partitions using partition magic ahead of time. from the beginning of the install, to surfing the internet while listening to a cd was 25 minutes. you can add all the other obscure packages later.
i'm using it right now, it's at this address where there are alot of distributions,and it's all the same operating system, redhat, slackware, and suse aren't the end all.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/