I like Fedora for a desktop pc (newer kernels etc), but centos/scientific are safer choices for server. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is probably a good compromise, generally has a bigger software library and better documentation. Oh, and yum is usable for package management, but apt/synaptic are vastly superior. Fedora now has yumex, which is an improvement but still lagging the debian stuff. You can do a headless server install, and add a de if needed (I run a couple at work over vnc)
EDITED: 23 Apr 2013 00:59 by DSMITHHFX