Haha Arch. Don't joke with me young man >:]
Gentoo/Slack/Debian. That's what you want ^^
No, I intentionally didn't include the "we put configure things with dpkg and patch our software because we know better than the authors, so it acts differently than the versions other people use" distro in that list.
And yet you included Gentoo, the "we can't seem to keep our custom package manager and dependencies straight so why should you" distro in your list

I'm an old hand with Debian (work related), Redhat (personal and work related), and Slack (my personal pref). I've run personal servers on Gentoo until around when Ubuntu hit it big and the portage tree got royally screwed up as far as dependencies were concerned (though I've heard they've corrected most of that). Edubuntu lives on my oldest daughter's PC, and I have both slack and ubuntu laptops and an ubuntu web server. Honestly, out of all of the distros i've had experience with, Slack is the best for customization and getting right down to source for everything (gentoo was a close second while i used it) and ubuntu is by far the most friendly.
Should anyone who loves linux bitch and moan about ubuntu making linux vastly more accessible and used? Only if they want to bitch and moan about the possibility of getting more software vendor support and developer support. I dunno, i'd like it if game devs would keep including opengl in their games and maybe even compile some linux binaries. But hey, maybe i'm just weird.
Oh and Xtras, good on ya for taking the plunge, I hope you have a fun and successful time with ANY linux distribution.