a friend of mine on Facebook gave me this link http://hasben.hubpages.com/hub/Top-5-Li ... -beginners

What is your opinion of these five?

Zorin is the only one I would consider suggesting you try from that list.

The others are either Gnome or LXDE, neither of which are newb friendly IMO.

Gnome I have found to lack decent GUI control interfaces, LXDE is very lightweight and cool, but only for old crappy ass machines to get a new lease of life, but again, they're not very newb friendly.

I again suggest a KDE/rpm based OS and from a major distro, the reason for going with a major one is the online support where you'll find step-by-step instructions on how to do things. Although those instructions will work with other distros, due to the shared software they all run, some of the locations for files and such will be different, making you life a lot harder.

deb vs rpm is a personal thing, I learnt with rpm and therefore get on with it better, deb is pretty much as capable, it's just different, think of a left hand drive car and a right hand drive (and the respective side to drive on the road), both fundamentally the same, but takes a while to get used to the subtle differences.

Ubuntu, again, is very very popular, I don't know how it got to be popular in the beginning, but I can see why it is now, because there's A LOT of support directly for it, which is a good thing, because I've found it to seriously lack GUI interfaces for doing anything, often requiring CLI work, plus it has like 3 package managers for installing new software and I can never figure which I'm meant to use.

EDIT:

Pick a couple of try, download the LIVE disk of it, burn to CD, run it and try it. No need to format your hard drive, no need to install or anything. It will be slow as it'll be running from a CD, but it's a great way to 'try before you buy'.

well I downloaded the Mint and pinyos versions as I om torrents for faster dl. time n the fact I couldn't torrent zorin t was a big file and take lots of time....so I'll give them a try and if nothing else I'll do zorros. Thanks for your help mate now I know whom else to bug with my issues..I mean questions

Noooo, go with magiera...!

ok I've run into an issue. I've downloaded a couple of the versions but on 2 of them I get this error when running the live disk: 'this kernel requires the following features not present on this cpu: pae Unable to boot please use a kernel appropriate for your cpu' any ideas?

I downloaded the 32bit version since I'm running an older xp pc so I'm not sure what's wrong...help!

Damn, what kinna POS are you trying to run this on? I'm assuming a laptop.

Check this link, more specifically the post with a rating of 19.
Gotta love the top answer in a google search for exactly what someone asked

Seems your system sucks really old and crappy donkey balls, try the workarounds or just skip those distros.