Since it hasn't been mentioned here, CentOS might be worth a look. It's basically a distro made from the RedHat source code with different colors and graphics, but it's free. :)
It's not as bleeding edge as Fedora 9, but it's more solid and stable. Plus, RedHat, and thus by extension CentOS, have a longer life to each release than is normal for Ubuntu/Fedora and many others.
That said, Ubuntu is fine too. That's what I run at home. :)
For window managers there are quite a few options. I was never a big fan of KDE, but have been quite happy with GNOME and XFCE. XFCE is more lightweight than GNOME, yet still has most of the same functionality. Another one I've used is Fluxbox. It's a minimal windowing environment (comes in at under 1mb) that uses very simple config files that you can easily customize. It's all based on a right click menu on the desktop.
As a side note, if you choose either Fluxbox or XFCE, you'll find that a lot of the software you can get for Linux, actually has dependcies on a whole bunch of either KDE or GNOME packages. So, if you install these, you've almost installed half of GNOME or KDE along with it. For instance, Krita is KDE based and depends on quite a few KDE packages, while GIMP is GTK based, and will need neither GNOME or KDE packages, so would be a better choice for a XFCE/Fluxbox system. You can see all the dependencies before you install the packages, (with synaptic, yumex, yum or apt-get).
It's not as bleeding edge as Fedora 9, but it's more solid and stable. Plus, RedHat, and thus by extension CentOS, have a longer life to each release than is normal for Ubuntu/Fedora and many others.
That said, Ubuntu is fine too. That's what I run at home. :)
For window managers there are quite a few options. I was never a big fan of KDE, but have been quite happy with GNOME and XFCE. XFCE is more lightweight than GNOME, yet still has most of the same functionality. Another one I've used is Fluxbox. It's a minimal windowing environment (comes in at under 1mb) that uses very simple config files that you can easily customize. It's all based on a right click menu on the desktop.
As a side note, if you choose either Fluxbox or XFCE, you'll find that a lot of the software you can get for Linux, actually has dependcies on a whole bunch of either KDE or GNOME packages. So, if you install these, you've almost installed half of GNOME or KDE along with it. For instance, Krita is KDE based and depends on quite a few KDE packages, while GIMP is GTK based, and will need neither GNOME or KDE packages, so would be a better choice for a XFCE/Fluxbox system. You can see all the dependencies before you install the packages, (with synaptic, yumex, yum or apt-get).