I used skepticals' strategy for the first half of my quest. I didn't follow "polls" too much because I wanted my decision to be based off my own experience.
For the second half of my quest, I changed strategies and started with the below questions:
1. What is your objective in learning Linux -- are you just interested in learning new things or do you plan using the knowledge as a tool?
2. What is it that you want out of the experience -- are you looking to mainly learn how to NAVIGATE through a different GUI or UI or are you looking to learn the internal workings of it, bypassing the GUI and UI altogether?
3. Do you plan on applying this new knowledge somewhere afterwards (i.e.: career, helping others, etc) or just learn it for pleasure?
This should help you determine whether you want to learn:
-Something that's old school but at the core of *nix (i.e.: Slackware, *BSD, Gentoo, etc), allowing you to deeply learn the internals.
-Something that is business oriented (i.e.: Red Hat, SUSE), allowing you to learn something that you have a better chance of using in a business environment.
-Something that is mainstream (i.e.: Ubuntu, Fedora), allowing easier transition and adaptation.
-Something that's brand new or unheard of, allowing you to be unique......I guess.
Just don't expect to find THE Linux for you overnight or in a week.
