It is my opinion, that if new user wants to boot from CD drive then they should use a LiveCD like Knoppix. If they want to install Linux to the hard drive then they should skip Knoppix & install a Linux distribution that is designed & intended to be installed to the HD. If they want a pre-configured user-oriented desktop PC, not server, then some good some good choices are Debian 3.1r0a (released Mon June 6), Ubuntu (GNOME desktop) or Kubuntu (KDE desktop) which are based on Debian or see RedHat backed Fedora Core 4 (released June 13). If they want a real noob friendly desktop Debian based distro & are willing to pay a small yearly price for support & software updates then they can use Linspire.

I hope this helps.
James