I need a grand master's advice

I'd just stick with ubuntu for now my friend... (If you don't have any unix/linux etc experience) the reason being...

1. Super easy install
2. Super quick support time on their forums, normally within 20 minutes you have an answer (I've waited days for other destro forum's help
3. Ton of other support as well, such a large community
4. The GUI is really pretty good so if worst comes to worst and you need to do something in the interface... you're good to go.

Personally I prefer to stick to popular distribution and for this reason I tend to work with Redhat - especially when it comes to a server environment!

CentOS has derived from Redhat at as mentioned and is also a good alternative. Because I work mainly with servers, I always use the Enterprise Linux distribution of Redhat

Hi charlox,
when we migrate from windows to Unix every one will face a situation similar to yours,other than these we also have some legacy destros mendriva,freeBSD,centOS
Redhat is one of the enterprise server os, fedora and ubuntu have very rich GUI and huge community to support.
you can also try OpenSolaris and SCO unix ware ,but in SCO unix we need check which unixware falls under category of free OS.