For me,
Mandrake is nice except it seems very buggy and the company is in big financial trouble.
SuSE seems nice but I will never use it or recommend it because YaST is covered under a non-free license and it is illegal to distribute the ISO's you get in the boxed set (they come with proprietary software)
Debian - I would use and recommend debian, but it is a pain in the ass to set up. It is also extremely outdated, unless you use the "unstable" branch, which I couldn't get to install.
Gentoo: bleh, it's so l33t it doesn't even *have* an installer. For ubergeeks with a weekend of time to spare only. Granted I got it to work (I am rather the geek after all) but after playing around with it I realized it has no future on any normal person's desktop.
Slackware - ok, very old school but not that hard to set up. I actually recommend it. (though I hate the way you have to edit bash scripts to change anything, that's just so outdated)
Fedora (or the distro formerly known as Red Hat)
This is the Windows XP of linux distributions. I actually mean this in a good way. It detects most hardware out there, is rather easy to use, doesn't contain a ton of bugs, and is the default desktop configuration is actually sane (and pretty, too) I definitely suggest you download it.
[ November 09, 2003: Message edited by: Linux User #5225982375 ]