If your going with Linux as a "desktop" system, you might want to shy away from Red Hat as the "Red Hat linux" line is officially discontinued now. Red Hat has decided to leave the desktop market and delegate the desktop version to a new branch - the "Fedora" Project.
If you are looking for a well rounded easy-to-use Linux distro, go Mandrake or SuSE. They also now have support for a growing number of Winmodems .. err.. "Linmodems"
and are a lot easier than RH cat be for first time users especially.