You can do almost anything with every Distro. Get some Live DVDs and test them. See if your Hardware works and how you like the Desktop. Desktop matters more nowadays than distribution.
Imho beginners (but not only) should choose an ubuntu based distro or ubuntu itself. Almost any software out there will be packaged for ubuntu and or debian. Most tutorials are written to cover ubuntu, there are so much more ubuntu forum post than any other distro and so on.