You know how the Linux community is broken into the Command-Line-Interface people and the Graphic-Interface-People? ClI or GUI? Ubuntu is defiantly GUI centered. The Sudo thing is confusing to a beginner and Mandriva has a Root account Plus Drake tools and MCC which stands for Mandriva Control Center. PCLinuxOS is a lot like Mandriva. If the current release of Mandriva is a good one it is the best beginners to intermediate O.S in my opinion. MCC is a lot like XP's Administrators-tools and Drake or draketools has a GUI answer that is not available on Fedora for example. I think Ubuntu is to heavy on the GUI side that after you are comfortable with it and want to do some CLI stuff with it , it will become appearent that you should have done some simple CLI stuff from the beginning. Ubuntu is a good O.S no doubt.