Especially if you have broadband via ethernet card I'd recommend
Mandriva OneCD
I used it back when it was Mandrake 9.1. It came out before Ubuntu and I still think the install/uninstall is superior. It uses APT package tool same as Ubuntu. When you boot OneCD it sets up internet access via your network card. You do your partition and user set up etc..
Then select all the packages you want with the package tool. It downloads anything that's not already on the CD. When you boot you come up to an X window manager login prompt. All the stuff you chose in the package manager is installed and ready to go. More impressive, if you want to uninstall and put your partitions back how they were, it's easy to back off. I found the Ubuntu uninstall unintuitive when I tried it about a year ago.
In short I consider it Ubuntu++
If you like Ubuntu you should love Mandriva.
edit: Also if you are into software development or want to try it, there's an incredible number of free software development tools that aren't toys already listed in the package manager. Mandrake was considered the Linux distro for developers. Perl, python, SmallTalk derivatives, Pascal, C/C++ Objective C.. and of course all the pattern and scripting tools that have been in Unix-like systems forever such as awk, grep, and the shell scripting.
And that doesn't even mention the database stuff. I downloaded full working implementations of CORBA for Linux over 15 years ago. You just can't get that kind of development stuff for free for Windows.
In short, er, I tried a bunch of Linux distros. Several versions of Slackware, Redhat, Debian, and a short trial of Ubuntu, but the one I liked the best was Mandrake, now Mandriva.
