Best Linux Distro?

[BrianG]

I'm not sure what games I'll play. For now, it's just a few ~5year old games, but only because the crappy ATI HD2600 vid card I have completely SUCKS (is actually a PCIe card with an AGP bridge chip to work with the AGP bus, but driver support is the worst ever). I tend to like driving games the most. My current older box runs XP just fine, but it is around 8-9 years old and time to retire to something a little less demanding.

At any rate, the box I want is a quad core or better, >=4GB or RAM, single graphics card (no need for dual for me), ~200GB+ SATA HDD maybe in RAID0 depending if it's even needed anymore with the current drives (don't need any more than 100GB TBH; but my backup drives would be nice to have 500GB). I'd like something upgradable so I'm not having to buy a whole new everything in a year. But I definitely want to run Linux as long as most of my current win apps will work (that is until I make my own apps to replace them).