I'm thinking Va is a slackware kinda girl.
I totally take that as a complement, but my distro is gentoo.
What distro I would recommend? Gentoo is nice, but you need to be
very comfortable with the command line to do a gentoo install, and it takes quite a while, because everything is compiled from source for your hardware, though there are ways to take shortcuts. After the initial install, maintenance is a breeze, and software installation is beyond easy, but it tends to take a while because, again, everything is compiled from source.
Debian is also very nice, very easy to keep updated, but last time I checked, initial installation was a bit challenging. I think I remember seeing where someone had created an installation procedure for Debian based on the Knoppix LiveCD, and made the install much easier.
As for the graphical-type distros like Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE, whatever, well, I hate them all. But I used Mandrake before I moved to gentoo. My position is, if you're going to
use Linux, you owe it to yourself to
learn Linux, or you might as well be using Windows. Maybe it's snobbery, but I think if you can't learn to love and appreciate the command line for those things it does best, you're probably never going to like Linux. You can have lots of fun with Linux, and learn a bunch with no commitment by using the Knoppix LiveCD distro--it's a full-featured Linux distro on a CD that runs completely out of memory and changes nothing on your hard drive. (BTW: A Knoppix CD is good to have around as a rescue disk, even if you only run Windows. No matter how fucked up your Windows install is, you can always pop in a Knoppix CD and get access to your files.)
I have some command line tutorials I wrote for my local LUG a million years ago, I can make those available if anyone is interested.
I really liked SUSE, but it is gone now.
SUSE is gone? I just bought a set of SUSE disks from LinuxCDs.com, I thought it might be nice for a friend of mine who is not extremely comfortable with the command line. I've grown to hate all that graphical Windows-wannabee crap. It's like, you have these graphical tools, but if they don't work, what do you do then? All they're doing is altering configuration files in the background, except they hide from you what they're doing, so if they fuck up, you don't know to do about it. You might as well be running Windows. Just wait, some fuck*ng GENIUS is going to recreate the Windows registry under Linux. Probably those Lindows fucks. Just wait.