Personally I think Ubuntu will work for anyone, in fact probably better than windows in some respects.

Slackware is my favorite though, and it is probably better to use if you want to learn how to use the various tools in Linux, fast.

That could be because they force you to, for one thing you have to launch the GUI with the command line. This in turn will lead you to know what are those run levels and so on.

For those geeks out there doing CS like me, I recommend Slackware. For those who want to get things done use Ubuntu.