Well if you dont mind text installers, I would say Slackware, even though you are against it. The only thing you would really have to setup is X, but I have found that 90% of distros make me do that anyway...especially something like Debian.
If you get Slackware, stuff will compile right...it just works. Once you get X working it will look and feel familiar to you.
Assuming you already know basic CLI commands, the only thing you need is cfdisk for partitioning, installpkg <name.tgz>, removepkg <name.tgz>, upgrade <name.tgz> <name.tgz> for changing what you have installed (just type ls in /var/log/packages for a list of what is installed)
it's very straightforward, but again, once you get it installed there are gui frontends for most things, including pkgtools i believe (pgktools is the sum of installpkg, removepkg, upgradepkg)
If you do set it up I suggest you install dropline gnome if you have broadband (it adds updated and optimized packages for i686).
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
download it and installpkg dropline-installer-2.2.7-i386-1dl.tgz
then just type dropline-installer and go through the process. It's mostly automated.
I'm not sure what it is, but when I used RedHat/Mandrake a few years ago I always found that they just wouldn't compile certain things....
Go with slack. If you do it and stick with it (it isnt that hard) you will thank me later. Debian is much harder to install and setup than Slackware IMO. If you need help with anything, this board has quite a few Slack users im sure
If you are still unimpressed, or just wanna run linux w/o doing any work, then go with Mandrake. You just install it and it does everything for you, and I mean EVERYTHING, which I think is bad....but maybe that's just me.
