Ubuntu isnt that hard to learn. There is alot of support on it online and everything has some instructions to installing somewhere. It was the first distro i went into and i liked it. Its like windows (with the some of the menus and commands) but it is alot better... I think that SuSe (and perhaps open SuSe) is the most windows-like since it tries to do everything with a gui (that's the impression that it gave me when I tried it). I personally like Ubuntu because I find that there is a fair balance of gui and command line usage. The only thing that I do not like about Ubuntu is the bloat: PDI apps, server, and bluetooth apps that I will not be using; don't even get me started on the kernel (it's as if everything is enabled). However, with its support and popularity I doubt that it will remain free (as in price) by the end of the year. Based on my experience, you need focus, time, and discipline in order to install more advanced distro's like Gentoo. I'm actually installing Gentoo into a separate partition from a chroot-ed environment with Ubuntu. Freakin' GNOME takes forever to emerge even with the USE flags that I've set, but I'm glad that my gentoo install will not be as bloated as my Ubuntu install.