What you guys say about the confusing number of choices is of course true. Distrowatch lists over 400 Linux distributions. Of course, most of those are designed for some specialised purpose, e.g. servers, firewalls, particular countries/languages, and particular slants such as multimedia. For the purposes of newcomers wanting a general-purpose OS, the first few in the Distrowatch list are all that need to be considered. I would rank them as follows:
1. PCLinuxOS - probably the easiest of all to start with, has an excellent suite of configuration utilities.
2. OpenSuSE - ditto, but not QUITE so easy.
3. Ubuntu - generally reckoned to be the coolest of the lot. Very stylish, but not so easy to administer.
4. Fedora - solid and reliable but rather dull.
5. Mepis - ditto.
1, 2 and 5 are available as live CDs, and 1 and 5 can be installed directly from the booted live CD. I recommend PCLinuxOS, which is currently the one I use on my main machine.
In all cases the best way forward is to participate in the user forums for the distro in question. In general, Linux people are very helpful, so long as you are prepared to put a bit of effort in yourself.
Eric