As Mnemonic said, you just have to try them and pick which one fits you best. Take a look at DistroWatch.com. They even have a "Major Distributions" section. And it'll probably be pretty frustrating and cumbersome to begin with, especially if your knew(ish) to Linux and/or CLI, but you'll learn a lot (mainly from mistakes!) and it'll be an over all good experience for you. If you know what you're doing with VMs and you don't have time/resources to format, partition, install, fuck up, reinstall, and mess with it, then you might want to just try them all in a VM, although installing will help you learn more. Hope that helped ;)