[Pat Fairbank]

I too would recommend Ubuntu as a good place to start. It's very user-friendly, and doesn't crash as easily as some distros when you mess around with it as an advanced user.

Drivers for commonplace devices like Ethernet cards come bundled and usually work right away, but obscure or proprietary devices, like some wireless cards, can be a real pain to install drivers for, sometimes requiring a kernel recompile. In fact, all drivers that don't come with the distro require some amount of work to install, since there isn't really an equivalent to the Windows Device Manager in Linux.