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Regarding your Linux questions:
The window manager is entirely personal preference. The one that works best is the one you like. I prefer Gnome myself, but that should not be taken as gospel.
There are slight differences in terms of applications available, but each has an analogue with the others.
As for distro, which one is 'best' depends a lot on what you intend to do with the box. Ubuntu is a good noob distro, so if you don't have any *nix experience it's a good place to start. I found that a lot of Debian's quirks and bugs carried over, and ultimately ditched it in favour of Fedora/Mandriva for daily use, but that was just me -- lots of people use it as their primary OS with no issues whatsoever, and the community is much more new user-friendly than some of the distros out there.
Ubuntu ships with Gnome. If you want to use KDE, you'll want Kubuntu instead. It's the same thing, just with a different window manager. Same goes for Xubuntu and Xfce, if that's your bag.
One thing I will say for Ubuntu and Debian -- Synaptic is the slickest package manager that ever was. It makes managing your installed software a breeze, and is the first package manager I've seen that makes me think it may in fact be possible to run Linux without having to compile any code (and thus, not having to spend potentially hours tracking down obscure libraries to resolve dependencies).
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I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said
- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame
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