I too am a newbie,
I started with lindows which became linspire - i don't reccomend it.
I progressed to Fedora core 3 which was easy to install and easy to use.
My wife was always a windows user and she found Suse the easiest learning curve. I tried Mandrake (now mandriva) which is also very easy to use and install and of course pclinuxos which seems like a mandrake spinoff, i liked this distro too.
Ultimately after playing with linux for about a year now I have settled on Ubuntu for my desktop and I am running Ark Linux on my laptop (Ark is also quite simple to use and runs well on older hardware). This was neccesary as my laptop has an old pentium 3 processor with only 128 mb ram. Ark also has a 'mission control' which is very user friendly - visit their website arklinux.org for screenshots.
The main reason i finally settled on ubuntu is that it is as stable as debian yet very easy to install, it found all my hardware (although I do check online and only buy linux compatible hardware) and has thousands and thousands of packages available.
I would take a guess that it has more packages than Suse, and possibly Fedora too.

I gravitated toward KDE for my desktop while others prefer Gnome. After coming from a windows background KDE seemed easier for me to understand although both desktops are excellent and Gnome could be a tad bit faster.

Another tip would be too learn how to find your way around the command line by studying the man pages. This has helped me immensely I also found a great book its for the Linux+ exams, I picked it up at the local book store and it explains about the file system etc.... A handy resource
Anyhoo, thats my two cents worth.