Well if you are new to Linux then you have opted for the best and most user friendly Linux OS that you can get into.
Lots of user friendly wizards (drak-wizards) that can help you out in any of the tasks that you wish for, excellent user friendly add-remove program wizard, also features a fabulous GUI and all other regular stuff like mp3player(xmms, mpg123) movie player(mplayer, xine) which you would never find in the most stupidest and most popular Linux (Redhat).
If you are completeley new to Linux I would recommend you to go into Mandrake Move (Live CD for the mandrake ditribution).For those of you who don’t know live CD its something that runs entire linux from CD itself without any need to install anything.
Mandrake comes in with one of the best hardware support (the other leader being SuSe).
Go in for this and you would probably forget all other distributions. As far as I am concerned, I have tried out all major distros like Redhat, Suse, Mandriva(formerly Mandrake), Slackware, Xandros, PClinuxOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Turbo and Yellow Dog linux, believe me Mandrake is one the gems to go in for. Or else you may also like to look in for Slackware as well as Suse which are best in terms of user convinience.
Of all Linux that I have tried probabaly Mandrake/Suse are BEST in terms of performane/stability/and ease while Redhat being undisputed LOSER in all cases.
Kudos to Mandrake