I installed Mandrake 8.0 on a Dell Inspiron laptop tonight.  Very cool.  If
you select the graphical LILO, it gives you a really nice menu system
instead of the text prompt, and the whole startup has pretty little icons
like on a Mac startup screen (only prettier).  

The KDE desktop has a link to DrakConf to configure all of your hardware and
some software (although, I did have to hack up the modules.conf to get sound
working properly on this particular laptop).  Anti-aliased fonts and icons
look great, but they're not on by default, you need to turn them on in the
Style dialog.  

I prefer editing config files by hand so I know what's going on, but
Mandrake 8 has enough put into the UI that even my mom could use it.  

Jay