Actually, I'm not a big fan of Fedora, but I prefer it to Ubuntu for sure. And as I believe I said earlier on, Fedora's more likely to be useful career-wise. Unless the OP is told to maintain servers all of a sudden, if he runs into Linux at work, chances are it'll be RHEL, Fedora or CentOS. Red Hat and CentOS function just about the same as Fedora, so familiarity with Fedora will give the OP the ability to use any of those systems with relatively little difficulty. I don't know how you've really managed to use any other version of linux if you found Fedora's command line difficult to use. Outside of package manager specific stuff (i.e. yum and rpms), Fedora's commands are Just about all the same as any other linux OS. And Ubuntu doesn't really have a leg up on Fedora for ease of installing packages either. Since I first tried it out three years ago, yum has had a graphical front-end that functions the same exact way as the GUI program from Ubuntu. Search for packages you want, tick the box next to the one you want, and hit install to install it and all of the dependencies.
Debian isn't that tough to use if you're just doing general purpose stuff. I managed it quite fine when I was first trying out linux and testing out a variety of distros.
Chakra is based off of Arch, which has some massively helpful forums, active IRC, and a wiki that will answer most questions you have before you need to go to either the forums or IRC support channel. There's also a decent community of people who just use Chakra, for specific questions.
Now for your BSD questions, what? Just get out... Yes, freeBSD has plenty of recognized programs. 23000+ and growing, at last count. What's not already there is usually pretty easy to port.
As for your next point, that everything should be as similar as possible to Windows, it's an idea I find pretty stupid. If someone I know complains that linux is should be more similar to windows and they want me to help them, the first help they'll get is
this. Linux isn't windows. If that's what you want, why are you bothering to try linux? If people cannot be bothered to learn how to use their new OS, I see no reason to waste all of my time helping them remove the things that make linux linux, and piece by piece turn it into a ghetto Windows. You don't see posts on OS X forums getting serious consideration if the person is saying, "Mac sucks because it isn't exactly like Windows." People don't bend over backwards to Window-ify OS X in response to that, they point out the benefits of their OS.
And @Freedom Kira: My point was that there are other distros that do all of that already. Ubuntu hasn't reinvented the wheel on anything. They've just done a good job marketing the wheel. Most major distros can be effectively run without touching the terminal these days. I don't see making the OS look and act as much like Windows as a possible to be a good thing, though. If I wanted it to look and behave as much like Windows as it could, I would install WIndows. And Ubuntu hits snags later on if you actually become a proficient user. They patch their programs all to hell, so their version works different from what's upstream. One patch to fix one program's incompatibility with a new version of something spawns 5 others, and then you wind up with a house of cards for an OS. They do other silly things that make it frustrating to use after a while.
When I was talking about it being confusing for the interface, based on what other people are saying it WOULD be confusing for a noob. It's a computer OS with a freaking tablet interface. There's no one who isn't going to be confused by that. And Ubuntu's already got the HUD coming down the pipes to further confuse people.
In short, there's a couple of things you folks here seem to be assuming off the bat. First, the user is an idiot. He's incapable of reading technically oriented instructions, and needs to be spoon-fed everything. Second, the user wants everything to be like Windows, except not actually be Windows. It's not cool to like Microsoft products any more, but he can't afford a Mac, so he must want a linux distro that looks just like Windows. And the big one, underpinning the first two assumptions, the user will refuse to learn how to do anything in a new way.
If you want something that looks exactly like Windows, behaves like Windows, and is controlled like Windows, why on earth are you going to use linux? Sorry to rant at you guys, but it seems like you're going out of your way to cater to a group of users who likely will not benefit from using linux, and will just go back to windows in the end, because it does everything they need, exactly how they need it.
Apologies for length, but it's as concise as I'll be able to get it.
