May favorite Linux distros are: Mandrake, Slackware, and SuSE in that order.
IMO: Mandrake is great for begginners and is a general purpose distro. Slack is more advanced and has no wizards(except thos in KDE or Gnome), and tends to run faster, but only supports install scripts or installing from source(no rpm's or deb's). SuSe is like Mandrake but far more bloated and slower, it seems more geared towards home bussinesses to me.