I've always used Red Hat (and now, Fedora Core 2). Fedora is a joy to use, very easy to install, good hardware detection, and lots of nice applications. It's a bit of a pain in some areas (e.g. Fedora doesn't contain any proprietary codecs, so you may find that you can't play mp3s as soon as you install). But I've got it working with a variety of USB drives, printers, wireless cards (I use a wireless ADSL router to connect to the internet, and connect to that from a laptop with a wireless card), etc.. It's also fairly cutting edge, so you get a 2.6 kernel, KDE3.2 etc., with lots of decent drivers.
However, what I'd recommend to make it really easy to use is to install apt4rpm (you can download it from see
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO). Run it from the command line with "apt-get mirror-select". Then configure it to pick up the Fedora Core, Extras and Macromedia repositories (this is straightforward, and apt4rpm will prompt you about what you need to do).
Next add the livna repository, which gives you all the multimedia goodies, like this:
cd /etc/apt/gpg
wget
http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
rpm --import /etc/apt/gpg/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
(basically, what we're doing here is importing the livna gpg key, so you can install their RPMs)
You then need to edit the apt configuration to add in the livna repository, like this for Fedora Core 2:
Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add these two lines:
rpm
http://rpm.livna.org/ fedora/2/i386 stable unstable testing
rpm-src
http://rpm.livna.org/ fedora/2/i386 stable unstable testing
You can now upgrade your entire distribution with "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade", and install packages like mplayer with "apt-get install mplayer". Very easy and stable. I also use synaptic as a front-end to apt4rpm, which is great if you're not sure what's available and want to browse.
As for software in Fedora: I use k3b for CD burning, grip for CD ripping, GAIM for instant messaging, Mozilla for email and browsing (with Flash and Java plugins), gftp as an FTP client, xine for watching DVDs, dvd::rip to rip DVDs, OpenOffice, the GIMP, Kate text editor, MySQL for databases, MyCC as MySQL front-end, Realplayer for Amazon audio previews, XMMS for mp3s/oggs, Konqueror file manager (I'm a KDE fan), Apache web server, Tomcat. This lot suits me: some of the applications might look a bit old skool, but they are stable and very flexible.
(Sorry if this is a bit abstract and/or not much help: I'm not sure what your level of experience with Linux is.)