Okay, there are really two questions to answer when you are selecting an OS -- especially a UNIX-derived one like all of these. How many resources are you able to put in your machine (memory, disk space2, etc)? And how much time and energy are you willing to put into running your computer?
Before I go further, Red Hat should come off your list. Why? 1. Fedora is the testing distro of Red Hat. That means it is slightly less stable than the version they sell to companies, but that version is so stable and impressive that Fedora is totally usable by most people. 2. A version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the trademarked and copyrighted material removed is distributed by CentOS. Red Hat has not been consistent about supporting home use of RHEL since about 2003 ( which was when I stopped using it). Despite my next point, I certainly do recommend Fedora or CentOS.
My next point is I'm mad at Fedora. I used Red Hat almost exclusively at the start of the millenium, so when this really powerful laptop I'm typing this on fell into my hands, and I wanted a quick distro to "make it work" into my hands fell a Fedora Core 8 KDE desktop liveCD, and it went into the computer without thinking. My first problem was not their fault, and it made me feel good about them: the CD was badly burned, it turned out, and the install barely run. I had internet access and a "yum update" and a few things like that quickly fixed that problem. Then I felt so good about it I made my big mistake: I upgraded to Fedora Core 9 (if you have been around Fedora/Red Hat as long as I have, doing it with Yum is easier than upgrading Debian, Ubuntu or any other distro from one release to the next -- except the one I'm on now. Fedora Core 9 had two features: selinux, which made it impossible to sign in at the console (the command line, which I do prefer), and KDE 4.0 which is a HUGE change from the KDE 3.x I'm used to. I hated it so much I'm sitting here on the same laptop typing this out on a Gentoo system running the XFCE4 desktop while running several tasks. I could, of course, have a far more sophisticated install on this: even with Gentoo, but Gentoo only installs what you explicitly tell it to and I've so far told it to install the bare minimum -- in other words my current install on the Fedora Capable laptop is the anti-Fedora install.
That said, I do not necessarily recommend against using Fedora. It has a high overhead, that is uses a lot of memory and disk space compared to other distros, and does a lot for you that I personally don't want done for me, but if you do things its way you will find it very flexible and useful.
Generally Linux choices fall into two categories, (relatively) easy to use and flexible, versus cryptic, efficient and demanding considerable knowledge, and with a high overhead (though generally not as high as Windows) versus with a low overhead.
Ubuntu, Red Hat variants, Mandriva and Suse are all relatively easy to use. Red Hat variants, Mandriva and to some extent Suse also have VERY high overheads, relative to everything else. My only good experience with Suse was a few years ago when a German group put a Suse emulator on-line you could run through your web browser, so nothing I can say about it will be definative.
Ubuntu is a derivative of a technical linux called Debian. It remains so closely related to it I've met Computer people who refer to themselves as Debian people when they use an Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu either, but I again, consider this subjective, and will help people with their ubuntu systems and so forth (I use Debian on one of my other machines). Other critics of Ubuntu will attack it as unimaginative because of its similarities to Debian. This is not a lack of imagination, it is a conscious policy because Debian has a low overhead ( I have it installed on a Pentium MMX laptop with 80MB memory -- yes, the machine is ANCIENT) and is very efficient and powerful. Relatively speaking, Ubuntu is less powerful than Debian or red hat, but it has a smaller footprint (much) and is one of the easiest distros to use.
Any system with a UNIX kernel is going to be less forgiving than one with a Linus Kernel. BSD is great once you know what you are doing. And it has a low overhead: I would rate it with Slackware and Gentoo neither of which is an easy to use distro but both of which are simple and great. Solaris has as high an overhead as Mandriva, and that is saying something. As an acquaintance said, with that overhead and no GCC out of the box, what's the difference between Solaris and Windows?
Now for my recommendation. It's not for a distro. The best OS is the OS which best meets your needs, and there are always issues it is well to deal with:
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/
asks you specific questions about what kind of computer you have and how you intend to use it. Based on that it makes a recommendation. There are others, and equally good, but from what I've seen you are prepared to think about whatever choice it offers anyhow.