Yep, linen is much like evenweave (in fact it IS an evenweave

) so if you choose a not-too-slubby linen for your first project you should be just fine!
Here's what I wrote for a fabric bingo I did some time ago:
Linen Fabric - technically one of the evenweaves, linens are usually classed separately. Apart from being generally less smooth than the other evenweaves, the main difference between linen and the cotton or cotton-mix fabrics is the "slub", which is "a slight irregularity in yarn produced either accidentally or purposely by knotting or twisting or by including uneven lengths of fiber in spinning".
In practice, this means that linen consists of thinner and thicker threads, so that the holes aren't all equally well-defined, and the crosses you make on it are not always of uniform size -- they may not even be perfectly square

. This unevenness makes linen slightly more difficult to work on than other evenweaves; however, if you are stitching a "traditional" design, such as a sampler, linen is the obvious choice -- not only because it would have been the fabric used in the original, centuries-old samplers, but also because it ages very well.
The two main brands of linen are
Zweigart and
Permin (known as Wichelt in the USA); of the two, Zweigart is smoother and has a closer weave, while Permin is stiffer and more open. The choice is really one of personal preference.
Linen comes in as many counts as other evenweaves -- more in fact, as it is made in much finer counts than the cotton and cotton-mix ones. Zweigart names its linens according to their count, as follows:
20ct Cork, 25ct Dublin, 28ct Cashel, 32ct Belfast, 36ct Edinburgh, 40ct Newcastle, 55ct Kingston.
It comes in many colours, among them
"vintage", which are given a colour wash to create a mottled effect, and it is also used in hand-dyeing, for example by
Polstitches.