Linux distros

[Webhead]

It's probably the Unity interface that you don't like. And you're not alone. Nobody likes it. I hate it too. I actually have been turned off to Ubuntu lately because of it. But instead of getting the latest, you could always get 12.04 LTS though. That has the normal Gnome interface and will be supported for awhile (when downloading Ubuntu, always go for the LTS version). Although there will be things you'll want that probably won't work because it's getting kinda dated. Like I think Chrome is difficult to install on it. Firefox will work fine though.

Maybe a better solution is to try 14.04 LTS and replace Unity with Gnome? Not sure if that's possible or not but you can Google on how to do that.

As for Red Hat,... take a look at CentOS. CentOS is a community version of it. Same exact software,... just coming from a different repository. But again, even the latest version of CentOS is fairly dated. For the latest and greatest in that world, you would get Fedora. For reliability and stability, you go for Red Hat or CentOS. CentOS 5.5 (which will update to 5.9) is probably what you'd be happiest with I think.

EDIT:
Wow, I see CentOS is up to version 7 now. I might have to check that out. Hopefully it's not using Unity. http://www.centos.org/

I think this is what you might want: http://vault.centos.org/5.5/isos/x86..._64-LiveCD.iso