I was introduced to Linux about a year and a half ago. I wasn’t impressed by it because of its user-un-friendliness ;). My first distro was redhat 6.2 and I recently installed Redhat 9 (shrike) <- thats the name not a sound :P.

I was impressed with the user-friendliess. The installation is a piece of cake, it provides various desktop environments like KDE, GNOME which are the most popular ones. Though Redhat 9 isnt comparable to ease of SuSE Linux its still a very good blend between a workstation, home/office computer and a server.
 
I being a Linux newbie was able to install/uninstall compile/recompile my kernel with ease :), though it took a lot of learning on my part it was still quite easy.

I am currently using Fedora Core 1. I am impressed with this version because of the new features that have been added. One piece of advice though, if your going to use the default 2.4.x kernel on Redhat 9 or Fedora then the system will be a bit slow and unresponsive in the desktop environments.
 
I highly recommened compiling the latest 2.6.x series kernel. But dont use the 2.4.x’s .config file! Also, for Redhat 9 you need to update a bunch of utilities but thats out of scope of this review.

Happy Linuxing!

Software version:

Redhat 9