How to choose a distribution
First thing you need to ask yourself is "What am I going to be using linux for exactly?" This might be something as simple as "Emails, Web Browsing and Office type stuff" it might be "Music, lots of Music, and videos, and pictures etc", "Education", "Religion" or just as an all-rounded system a little less bloated than Windows or Mac.
Second thing you have to ask, and partially more important than the first, "what can this computer I'm installing linux on handle?" Linux can run on anything from toasters to supercomputers, so don't take me lightly when I say it can run on anything.
Catch with both of my previous questions is that it doesn't particularly matter, it just means if you start off with a good idea of what you need and what the computer can handle, there's going to be less downloading and fiddling around later on, but now I'm going to dive into a little bit of the nitty gritty of it all.
Desktop Environments and Window Managers
For the purpose of simplicity I'll say that these are the same things except that desktop environments are usually a lot larger and use more ram than window managers, but in essence, these are what handle everything you tell the computer to do, it's what lets you launch programs and sets the desktop wallpaper, it's what takes the fact that you are moving the mouse and shows this on screen, it's basically what you interact with. I'm just going to give my recommendations to a few different ones and hopefully when looking at a large list of iso's you can think of these and it will hopefully help with a choice
XFCE - Lightweight but plenty of features, my current window manager
Gnome 3 - Personally not a fan, but probably wouldn't be too bad as a first linux desktop environment, from what I know, lots of people who have been using linux for quite some time don't like it and prefer mate (which is a fork of Gnome 2)
Fluxbox - Lightweight but probably not quite as practical as XFCE, has a few nice little features I love
KDE - It feels very Mac-like to me, just how it looks also, lots and lots of eye candy, but uses a lot of resources
Cinnamon - Another fork of Gnome 2 made by the linux mint team, one of my favourites, good balance between speed, looks and functionality (Looks better than mate [again, in my opinion] but uses more resources)
Unity - The default Ubuntu desktop environment, I dislike it with a passion, others like it
And secondly with a distribution there's the community and support, because things will go wrong and you will be confused, but as long as you use google, you'll be fine, honestly. but the ones with the best support in my mind are
Linux Mint - If I've ever had a problem, their forums are the first place I go (partially because I use linux mint)
Ubuntu Forums - The second place I go, because mint is based of ubuntu so a lot of fixes work on both
The Arch Wiki, It's a wonderful place to learn more about particular programs I found, also it's absolutely fantastic if you're running arch obviously
So I'll boil it down to a few reccomendations
Linux Mint XFCE - It's near on perfect for everyday use, Lots of support, and it's lightweight, the cinnamon version is equally good but doesn't quite seem to have the "Log in, everything's done" sort of feel to it in my opinion, but I usually install the cinnamon version and then install xfce in later - probably come to this in another post one day
Fedora/Fuduntu - while sounding like ubuntu, fuduntuĀ is based off Fedora and it is what I introduced my little brother to linux with, I was surprised at how quickly he adapted to it and began to use it on a daily basis, it may of been that there was no messing around to get the wifi to work, or it might've been it had a fair amount of eye candy, what ever it was it falls into my recommendation for computers with a bit of hardware in them
Ultimate - For those who have a decent computer and just want to go, it has everything I can think you'd need already installed, one day I'll probably commit and install it as my main linux os, maybe.
Ubuntu Studio - I haven't used it for about 3 years, but that was because when I used it, it was very very buggy on my computer, if I were to try it again I feel like I would be pleasantly surprised just going by how the website has changed
Elementary - it has a very sleak and minimal type feeling to it, I guess I recommend it to those who like kinda an elegant type of os, to me it's not quite ready to be used all the time though, but if all you need is a web browser, a custom media player that looks like itunes and eye candy, then go for it
and for some others which are supposed to be good for beginners try hereĀ http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Beginners