That's an extremely vague question at best, but some easy to use distros include Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandriva, Xandros, and Linspire.

Your request for information is entirely too subjective for us to give you solid answers. If your definition of "best" is that the GUI looks like Microsoft Windows, then you'll probably want something running KDE, which many Linux OSs can do. I'm a fan of Kubuntu (Ubuntu running KDE). Otherwise you're going to have to spend the time to research them yourself and find one that you like.

Bill

Go for redhat .

My advice? Try them ALL! At least the mainstream ones. Most everything else is based on one of the mainstream distros. It's all a matter of preference. I started out with RedHat and rpm dependencies drove me nuts... Found Debian a few years later and fell in love with their apt package manager.

Most distributions these days come with a live cd so that you can try them out without even having to install them on a hard drive. Some of the ones that I would recommend you start with:

Ubuntu
OpenSuse
PCLinuxOS
Fedora
Xandros

I believe all of these (except maybe Xandros... It's a commercial distro, with a stripped down free version) have live CD or DVD versions available.

Hope this helps! The thing that makes this question so hard is that Linux can be anything you WANT it to be! With very little experience, you can take just about any distribution out there and make it as windows-like as you want.

-G

I love Ubuntu and Fedora Core. I also give my cents to Solaris though not sure if is Linux ro Unix based (I guess Unix based)

Check out this recent blog entry: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3322.html

As far as performance goes, all Linux distros run about the same since they have the same kernel. However, when it comes to UNIX OS's vs. Linux, then that's a debate concerning performance.

But, as far as other issues, such as ease of use, compatability, etc. I'd say that Ubuntu-based distros seem to be the easiest for me to install and use (with full use of sound card, wireless net card, ethernet, etc.) right away when compared to a Debian distro. I think the e17 desktops actually use hardware acceleration, so they would give a faster desktop window performance - which was one aspect of XP that made it superior to ALL other OS's during the time before Vista.

Other performance issues, such as scheduling efficiency, etc. - again, those are related to the kernel used by the UNIX or Unix-like OS. I think that Linux generally runs slower than Solaris, so if you want a faster OS, I'd say go with OpenSolaris or Nexenta (uses DEbian userspace) instead of any of the Linux distros. If you want an e17 desktop (without putting it in your OS yourself) get either Elive (fast but a pain to install any drivers) or Maryan which is slower than Elive but runs all my hardware right away. Elive would never install any of the Debian drivers for my laptop - EVER!

Yeah, it's definitely UNIX-based dude. It's certified against the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). I know, Linux is Unix-like, but it's not certified, so it technically isn't. Also, the two kernels are very different. The Solaris kernel out-performs the Linux in certain situations.
All Linux distros use the same kernel but just use a different user-space. How they can get the kernel and user apps to interact with each other is where the user-space differences in the Linux Distros comes into play.

But, the kernel is pretty much the center of the OS and is where the major differences between OS's come into play.

At last tell us which distro convinced you and why!!