First off let me adjust your expectations a little.
You need to keep in mind
Linux Is Not Windows: You'll need to climb a learning curve and find new software to do things you were proficient at before since they're just not the same. As long as that's understood:
If you want a graphical system for day-to-day use, Ubuntu is good. It's a bit of a pig as far as Linux distros go but for a modern machine that's not a problem. It's very easy to install and user-friendly, and compatible with hardware that drives other distros batty. Its fancy autoconfigurators make it difficult to really play with its internals however; you won't learn much about traditional UNIX administration from it. It's still fine for learning shell scripting and the like, which you'd probably want to learn first anyway.
Once you're comfortable with the shell you've got your choice of lots of distros. Debian's fairly traditional, and Ubuntu's actually derived from it. Gentoo's challenging to install and configure but will teach you lots of things real fast, and is
the distro to pick if you're interested in the C language since it compiles nearly everything from source.
As for better modern languages, I challenge them to find a modern language that's not
written in C.