You could give Linux Mint a try.
It originally launched as a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs and has now grown to be quite a usable and active operating system. (And it looks pretty sleek as well :))
From their website:
Some of the reasons for the success of
Linux Mint are:
- It's one of the most community driven distributions. You could
literally post an idea in the forums
today and see it implemented the week
after in the "current" release. Of
course this has pros and cons and
compared to distributions with
roadmaps, feature boards and fixed
release cycles we miss a lot of
structure and potentially a lot of
quality, but it allows us to react
quickly, implement more innovations
and make the whole experience for us
and for the users extremely exciting.
- It is a Debian-based distribution and as such it is very solid and it
comes with one of the greatest package
managers.
- It is compatible with and uses Ubuntu repositories. This gives Linux
Mint users access to a huge collection
of packages and software.
- It comes with a lot of desktop improvements which make it easier for
the user to do common things.
- There is a strong focus on making things work out of the box (WiFi cards
drivers in the file system, multimedia
support, screen resolution, etc).
After installing, Mint will probably be your default OS of choice (I don't recall a single operating system that does not sets itself to default), but this is quite easy to change. If you want to save yourself the hassle of manually editing GRUB's menu.lst, you can install Start-up Manager to do this for you. The link describes a step-by-step guide to doing this.
