Ohh no ! welcome to the linux world

now can you recommend a GNU version for beginner ?

I will also say ubuntu, but for the smallest learning curve (and similar layout) i will recommend Zorin, it is ubuntu underneath but the Zorin group does one hell of a job with the layout.

http://zorin-os.com/

PMSL

+10chars

Actually, when I first looked into this last year I recall Mint being mentioned a lot.

Granted, I don't know much about Mint, but I do know that Ubuntu is by far the most user-friendly Linux distro I've used (among Red hat, Fedore, Suse..). Also, its online community dwarfs all others, which is a good thing when you need to ask something. Further still, most software is available for it in precompiled downloads. Not so with most other distros. Basically, Ubuntu is nowadays the "standard distro", most widely adapted, etc..

You can download a free utility called 'unetbootin' that can create a bootable pendrive from any Live CD ISO image, that way you can easily give any distro you're interested in a test drive without making any changes to your system.

YaST (openSUSE, thus)
to expand on abyzthomas posts

• Xen is definitely an advanced feature;
  not advisable for GNU/Linux newbies
• openSUSE 12.1 now again comes with KDE3
  it is a port of Trinity Desktop Environment
  spares you the hassle of KDE4 (even though your hardware seems to be up to the challenge ) and remains in the spirit of Linux of old
  there is also a live CD @ TDE (based on a somewhat older Kubuntu release) that can be installed on a hard disk as well
• from my experience with Fremantle for nearly two years and openSUSE for nearly six years i have to say... deb is a manure all right and YaST is by far the best "control panel" you may wish for.
• rather then live CDs, i would suggest you download VirtualBox and give each distro a run for its money with an install.
  as you can use ISOs as CD / DVD in VirtualBox, the installation will go as a breeze (definitely with two or more HDs...) and it'll make it easier to "save your setup / preferences / bookmarks & all" over several sessions
  and you may even have several VMs / distros next to each other & compare them directly

may the force be with you

Linux sucks!

Greetings from:

Mr Elop

My vote for Mint too, it is based on ubuntu.

Check out Lili USB creator. It creates a liveusb of any modern distribution with tie twist that you can also run it on top of windows virtualized. Very handy when you are away from home and have access to another pc.