http://www.zaurususergroup.com/index.php?n...2258&highlight=http://www.zaurususergroup.com/index.php?n...1752&highlight=Everyone uses different distributions for a variety of reasons, in short, you will get as many answers as there are distributions.
If you are VERY new to it and want no technical worries try Lindows, it\'s commercial and supported and very easy to use, a bit like Windows, a bit MacOS X, but it\'s a powerful Debian underneath if you want to go crazy and hack it. You can get it free but to get more software you need to subscribe to a download service. If you want to use the command line and customise it, you can rip the subscription stuff out and use the Debian apt-get command to get all the software you could ever want. Every newbie that I\'ve demo\'d it to has been very impressed how easy and friendly it is.
If you are proficient, I\'d recommend SuSE - it simply works. I have recently converted to Debian, using Knoppix to install it.
Easiest first to most difficult
Lindows
SuSE
Mandrake
Redhat
Fedora
Slackware
Knoppix (is Debian)
Debian
There are MANY more, but these are the major ones and that\'s how I would rank them for a newbie.
If you have peripherals, they have to be Linux compatible.