SuSE 8.2 pretty good for newbies
 

After years of using RedHat, I switched to SuSE.

One pleasent surprise with SuSE was that the JRE environment gets installed by default when you do a normal installation.

My Limewire ran without me having to tweek environment variables.

For those newbies out there getting frustrated with $PATH, /etc/profile, vi, etc. They should look at SuSE.

You can install SuSE from the internet for free. The internet version does not have have some comercially licensed applications that are included in the comercial version of SuSE. I bought SuSE Profesional ($79) because I was interested in one such application that otherwise would have cost $199 by itself. Plus the SuSE profesional comes with two printed books: SuSE User's Guide and SuSE Administrators Guide.

There are other nice things in SuSE that make it attractive to newbies. Instalation and configuration is very easy with their tool YaST2.