While still being somewhat of a newbie to Windows alternatives, I've been toying around with various Linux distros and FreeBSD. So far, I've been very pleased with Ubuntu and Debian (seeing as how Debian is "the rock upon which Ubuntu is built").
To me, Ubuntu is very user friendly for someone that doesn't have much experience outside of MS Windows. My sound wasn't working on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Being inexperienced at fixing it, I left it as it was. Once I did the upgrade to 6.10 "Edgy Eft", my sound worked perfectly. I've decided to go with an Ubuntu install on my desktop computer at home (using the GNOME 2.16 desktop, which I've found I seem to like) and continue looking into FreeBSD or Debian for a server install at work (my new place of employment, that is).
The various distributions I've played around with are Debian 3.1, Ubuntu 6.10 and 6.06 LTS (and Kubuntu - Ubuntu with KDE), Fedora Core 6 and 5, FreeBSD 6.1, DesktopBSD 1.0 (based on FreeBSD 5.5), FreeSBIE 1.1 (again, based on FreeBSD, but version 5.3), and Gentoo (can't remember which version).
