i know i have threads here were i bitch my head off about ubuntu then everyone stuck up for it. I choose to create my own os and i build the first version of it from Ubuntu seeing how everyone stuck up for it and now i stuck up for it and felt dumb. Ubuntu is quite awful. And if you want to use an "easy" Linux, i'd recommend it's father Debian. Slackware is like BSD but not, it's disk labesl are different and the kernals are so similar in some ways but totally different in others.. I actually think the hardsest OS i have used is Solaris 10. I was completely new to it when i started using it as a full time OS. Suse, Redhat (enterprise), Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and FreeBSD seem, to this day, to be standards in the system administration world. When i started using Linux back in like 2000 i started with Redhat and i thought it was cool. Then i found SuSe and thought it opened my eyes to all new stuff.. then i found slackware when the "WHAX!" and "Backtrack" live cd's were introduced. Then i just started to use Debian and i got seriously bored of it and moved on to Solaris. Solaris is hard because, to me, it's the closest resemblence i have had experience with to Unix. driver supprt is low (unless your rich as hell and can afford their HW), and they too have a cool packaging system like aptitude where yopu just go to a certain website, get a link to a dep or app and wget it and install it:
pkgadd -d <package>-local
post script:
I used to think bash and unix commands to parse text were cool, then i found out that Perl is insanely more proficient in doing it. But now i have gone back to using the shell, only with "Built-in" commands which are insanely longer to type out, but make me feel 1337 doing it
So you can see how my mind jumps around with things. There's too many choices and i wanna try them allllllllllllll!!