[LCD Monitor]

I currently run Fedora Core 5 on both my work machines and web servers and haven't had a single problem. Plenty of features, good hardware support and excellent installers make this one of the most robust distrobutions available.

There are plenty of others though, and I would like to try my hand at a couple to see if there is anything more user friendly for the other half to get into.

So, any suggestions? I've only got a limited connection so unfortunately I'm not really in a position to download all of the bigger names like SUSE, Debian, Gentoo and so forth, so any thoughts are more than welcome as to where to go next.

[Cobalt]

Mandrake and SUSE are supposedly very good for beginners to Linux and have fairly user-friendly interfaces and setup prompts.

Linux isn't the easiest beast to tame, but as you said once you've got to know your way around you can do a lot more for a lot less. Games support is lacking unfortunately, but given a good Windows emulator anything is possible.