By far for someone like my, beggining to use Linux, I found RedHat, Caldera Open, and Mandrake to be the easiest to manage.
I stopped using Mandrake just before the war. And would like to try SUse, and Gentoo. However I find they require kernel compiling, for my systems.
RH 9 actually does not configure easily with my laptop video. There is definitly allot of support out ther for most of the distros.