I've tried at least 20 distros over the past six months (osboxes.org is really amazing for trying a bunch in pre-installed, VM form). My picks for the best comb

I've tried at least 20 distros over the past six months (osboxes.org is really amazing for trying a bunch in pre-installed, VM form). My picks for the best combination of aesthetic and works-out-of-the-box were: - Fedora Cinnamon (I'm using the Cinnamon version of Korora, which is Fedora with some packages and themes preinstalled to make it a little more user-friendly) - Linux Mint - LMDE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition, if the whole security and package-breaking thing scared you off the regular version) - Kubuntu (KDE Plasma is a really, really nice desktop. I fully admit that I'm sticking with Cinnamon because I spent 20 years on Windows only and it feels more "familiar") I've also got Ubuntu Trusty + xfce on my Chromebook, but it's running in a chroot and piggybacking off of the Chromebook's native Linux support, so I don't quite consider it a full install and can't evaluate it's "out of the box" support for hardware, etc. I'm personally thrilled with having found Korora (https://kororaproject.org/ https://kororaproject.org/). Fedora's hardware support seems to be better than some of the other distros I've tried as far as getting stuff working out of the box, so being able to throw Cinnamon on top of that pretty much gives me everything I want, sans perhaps less native packaging availability than Debian/Ubuntu. elementaryOS would be somewhere up there, as I do like it, but I'm mostly just interested in the Pantheon desktop, which has been nearly impossible to get working on anything other than Ubuntu.