Hi Dale,
I must have installed Mandrake 9.0 5 times so far and equally Red Hat 8.0 as well as Red Hat 7.3. I found out that Mandrake 9.0 and Red Hat 8.0 are very good replacements to Windows and really easy to install and use.
You will find out the transition from Windows to Linux a bit bumpy, since you are used to certain things that are not there any more. For instance the Control Panel is not where you expect it to be (being used to from Windows) and you will have to mount a drive before you use it (well most of the times).
The installations that I mentioned (Mandrake/Red Hat) are indeed good but they are stuffed with software that you might never use. For instance I found in the Red Hat that you have Ximian Evolution installed as your mail client and also KDEMail. You only need one really and for me one thing that was really annoying in Windows was the amount of useless files that the system had. The comparison was with Outlook Express and Outlook.
For that reason I opted for gentoo. You will find out that the more you install/use Linux the more you will get to know things and you will find yourself in the not too far future to opt for a customized system, optimized for you.
One drawback is that some of the vendors of hardware continue to ignore linux in developing drivers for their products. Fortunately before I bought my hardware (cards etc) I ensured that they all had support for Linux, cause I knew that the time will come where I will switch to it permanently.
