I used it from 8.04 to 9.10 and recognized that it was more buggy with every release. Instead of fixing the bugs the developers concentrated on inventing new shiny features, even on their "stable" LTS release 10.04. I have not seen this behavior changing since then. I personally find this behavior counter-productive and even damaging the image of Linux, just because many people that wanted to switch from Windows were given the recommendation to try Ubuntu. And what have they seen? A Linux distribution that concentrated on shiny things, but was buggy and for many people even not usable (Intel onboard graphics anyone?). In short: Something that had the same issues as Windows.
Even worse is that Canonical tries to achieve a vendor lock-in with Ubuntu One and their music store and if you want to contribute to Ubuntu you have to give them the copyright of your code.

For me that is not acceptable, so I don't recommend Ubuntu to newbies. If you want to use the large software base of Ubuntu then try Mint, it is more polished and compatible to Ubuntu.

I will try Linux Mint then.

I wish I had another computer to learn linux so I don't have to worry about messing up my mac.

Install a virtual machine, like Virtualbox, and use that to install Linux in it. This way you don't have to mess with the configuration of your Mac.

I run windows through parallels and it doesn't run that smoothly, but it is windows.

I was looking at parallels and you can use fedora and ubuntu and it installs it for you so i think ima try both of them.

So the fedora that parallels installed is fedora 15. Do I have to burn fedora 16 to a cd and install it like that or can I get an update?

first of all, just wanted to say that I couldn't agree more with Tobi.

on topic now; there's something that no one has mentioned yet. dual booting Linux on a Mac is slightly harder to do because they use an efi instead of a BIOS. you might want to look into refit, and be sure you install your Linux bootloader to "/" (root).