[evulish]

There are a few questions you need to ask yourself beforehand. What do you want to do with it? Desktop or server? Do you want ease-of-use or flexibility? Do you want it to auto-detect all your hardware on installation or do you not mind doing stuff like that by yourself? Do you like to dive right in? Do you want a simple way to install packages? Do you want something resume-worthy?

I mean, there are hundreds of distros for all different kinds of users. Most of my time spent on the internet is giving out free Linux tech-support via IRC. Doing that, I see all different kinds of users who just want Linux and didn't bother to even look into it. Probably the most popular distros I see are: Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo.

Now, those first three are some of the easiest distros to use, many think. They'll detect most of your hardware on install and set everything up all nice and pretty. That's fine. The downside is they're all RPM-based. Since you have used Redhat in the past, you probably know that RPM's are the packages for Redhat Package Manager. It's a decent package system, but I hardly recommend it. Just using rpm can send a person into RPM hell where there are packages that need to be installed but you think they're already installed and you have to fight the entire system. That's normally the biggest flaw of those RPM-based system. On the other hand, many companies have heard of Redhat and SuSE (many haven't heard of debian, slack, and gentoo). These distros will pretty much hold your hand through the installation and have GUI apps for about everything. You won't be forced to learn too much and it'll be about as easy to use as Windows.

On the other hand, Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware pretty much require you to get down and dirty. These distros won't auto-detect your hardware, they won't tell you exactly what to do during the install (but you can figure it out using the docs online), but they will usually leave less of a dent in your free space. These distros can be very customized. Gentoo has the trump on Debian and Slack; you can compile the entire thing from scratch to optimize it for your computer. These distros can pretty much run on any system where Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE require pretty new systems just to install. These distros are great for running a server on a spare computer or really tinkering around. Also, Debian's apt and Gentoo's portage package systems are probably the best I've seen. They allow you to download and install the package along with all dependencies with one command.

In the end, any distro will work on just about any type of hardware.. Any Linux software will work on pretty much any distro. Anyways, the best way to find the distro that's best for you is to try a few. If you have broadband and a few blank CD's, you can install as many as you want.