Well, if you do like me, buy yourself a pack of 50 cdr and prepare to burn. It, personally, took me around 30 cd's and going through 6/7 distros to find one that suited me best. One thing you can do if you don't want to install Linux to your HD is try a Live CD. Live CD's have the OS on the cdrom, and run completely off of it, without having to install anything. This way, you can "try before you buy" idea. I went from Mandrake (user friendly) to Fedora (yum) knoppix, mepis, before Ubuntu, back to Fedora (FC4 just came out) and finally stuck with Ubuntu as my Linux OS.Another thing to look for is a good user community, where you can get lots of help and friendly advice as well.