I like Fedora GNU/Linux since it's split from Red Hat. It appears to be moving in Debian's direction, i.e. it's a community-driven distribution. The key difference between it and Debian, though, is that it will likely have more/better commercial support since it's the baseline for Red Hat's commercial distribution.

http://fedora.redhat.com/

Installation requires downloading a bunch of CD images, but the installer is very well done. It figured out almost all of the hardware on a state-of-the-art laptop; the only item it missed was the strange screen resolution, and it got pretty close.

The first thing you'll want to do is disable the extremely annoying console bell. Edit /etc/inputrc and uncomment the line set bell-style none. It's right at the top of the file - I guess a lot of people want to do that so they make it easy.

You'll want to install apt, which is a front-end to rpm. It makes it very easy to download and install packages because it knows what other packages each package depends on. http://fedoranews.org/jorge/howto/howto02.shtml

As I write this (March 2004) Fedora Core 1 is the current release and Fedora Core 2 has just entered test. I installed Core 1 and decided to use apt to upgrade, based on the intructions at http://fedoranews.org/ghenry/apt-fc2/.