What are your needs?

Ah the linux distro holy war! You will not manage to find anyone agreeing on which is the best distro. Instead of asking that you should be writing down what you want from your distro and your Linux experience i.e: speed,easy of use,hacking tools,codec support,big community,etc... That makes much easier to pinpoint one of them. Your room mate is right CentOS is usually used for servers and Ubuntu is more user friendly. I personally dislike Ubuntu but if you go that route then try Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu but it comes with all propietary codecs to play videos and listen to music. http://www.linuxmint.com/ My recommendation for a Linux beginner who wants to do with Linux all that Windows does, is OpenSuse or Fedora. OpenSuse: http://www.opensuse.org/ Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/en/