I was recently introduced to linux by a friend at school. He gave me the disks for Mandrake 9.2 and I installed it on my machine with no problems. I am just curious though, since I am a beginner with linux, are there better distributions for me to use?

depends .......

1) can you learn?
2) are you GUI only for everything?
3) do you like to use/know your computer/system/OS?
4) can you solve problems without stressing out?

Not better. Different. You'll learn much with Slackware, Debian or Gentoo.

Are you willing to ? It's up to you .

Cheers

Dude! U need FreeBSD.
I know, i know, it's UNIX; But, its sooooo much better. It's really helpful if you want to learn the UNIX/Linux OS technology and structure.

There are a lot of Linux distros around and the only way to find out which is the best for you is to try out a few.

better is a matter of oppinion and nothing more in linux.

example. for newbies (yeah im still one, just not as much of one) i highly reccomend any of the main 3 RPM based distros. RedHat (now called Fedora Core), SuSe, and Mandrake(MDK).

i personaly can not stand MDK after the horrid issues i had with it on my laptop. SuSe and RH/FC are both top notch. they all have very intuitive GUI based installs, they all have loads of bloat so that will slow down older systems, but it is great for someone who is new to linux as all of the major tools are already installed for you.

i spent a little over a year working with RH9 before i moved to debian. if i had tried debian to start with i can tell you the learning curve would of been to great for me and i would of ended up hating it. i now love debian and am working on converting all of my linux systems over to debian.

my sujestion is start with something easy like FC or SuSe and take time to learn enough to get comfortable with the CLI (command line interface) and get some basics of linux under your belt, then fork out and start experimenting with the more 'powerful' distros like slack, debian, gentoo, etc...