Greetings and welcome
Mandrake is one of the easiest to install and is where i started when i decided to get into 'nix really heavy. Although Drake is easy and a good place to get going to try to laern your way around the diffrent "Desktops" or Window managers i would suggest Redhat for trying Apache and FTP. The hardest thing i found about switching from Windows wasnt learning a new system, but rather unlearning the "Windows" way of doing things. There is a GUI for just about everything in 'nix, but sometimes the gui doesnt do what you want or can be confusing as hell.
Now that im done rambling, ill give a few places to start to get you used to 'nix and leave you in the gui mode....
(these are some of the programs i use on a daily basis, they may not be your style, but its a place to get an idea)
Mozilla
www.mozilla.org for your browsing pleasure
Evolution
http://ximian.com/products/evolution/ for Email, and a few other related things
Kmail comes with KDE, another one to get you used to email clients
Gftp
http://gftp.seul.org/ ftp client
Xmms
www.xmms.org for your mp3 listening pleasure
Gaim
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gaim/ for Instant messaging
now, there are tons of diffrent programs out there that do all those things, but those are the ones ive found that work for me :rock: