[Nottingham] What distro?

[Jim]

My colleague at work is thinking about 'making the switch' :)

I was wondering what distro you recommend for the chap. He is very computer 
literate (he's a C++ developer) and even has experience of UNIX; he has used 
Knoppix and likes KDE, so a KDE-based distro would be good; and he is very 
much into the idea of a fully 64-bit system, so that is very important too.

I would recommend SuSE as I use that myself, BUT I feel I can't recommend it 
to a beginner because of it's lack of out-of-the-box support for mp3s. (I'm 
aware of why this is and fully understand it, but still). 

So, what distro is 
a) Linux newbie friendly 
b) 64 bit throughout
c) KDE-based
d) Supports mp3
e) Comes with free/OSS but non-GPL apps like Firefox and Netbeans

Recommendations, chaps?
TIA,
Jim