Lindows is crap. Any distribution that encourages general use of the root account sucks by default.

Right, OK. Some great input there.

Well, it used to encourage that, but I think that has been changed now for the current releases. In any case, I would recommend Libranet 2.7 or Xandros 1.0 (Xandros somes with CrossOver Office and CrossOver Plugin) for the ones that you would pay for, and you can try out Knoppix by running it from the CD. These are all based on Debian, which is a very good distibution that has a far superior package management system than RedHat (and any other RPM-based distro). Currently, I am moving to Gentoo myself, but it can be a bit of a bear to install and get working, but is much more up to date than even the unstable or testing branches of Debian (which is what Knoppix and Libranet are based on).

I agree Lindows is shit. I've installed it on my wife's computer, and took it off almost immediately. It runs with root permissions always, not good.
 
Clutch is right, libranet 2.7 and xandros are much better.
 
BTW hope you have all weekend to work on your gentoo install. It took hours just to install the x-windows e-build. But it's well worth all the trouble.

I have gone through about 8 Gentoo installs, and by far the slowest of anything to get done has been emerging kde on a Dell P2 400. It took more than 2 days to finish it. Now, I just run Fluxbox and get either the libs or base install of Gnome/KDE to suit the needs of the apps I use (I love GDM, and there's some KDE utils I like, but DCOP can have seizures when you try to launch them in outside of KDE). Other notables have been emerges of Sun's Java SDK and Mozilla.