Mandriva

Recovered from near bankruptcy, originally known as Mandrake; an attempt to produce a user friendly Linux.

Originally forked from RedHat Linux (perhaps around version 6?) due to RedHat's lack of support for KDE (which at the time was far superior to Gnome), Mandriva has gone on to be one of the main commerical distributions.

It is a good starter distribution, and purchasing the box set gives the user e.g. Codeweavers Cross Over Office and goodies.