I'm very satisfied with Linux Mint 18 and Cinnamon. Everything ran out of the box on my Thinkpad; It comes with nice looking fonts that render well; The Mint-y

I'm very satisfied with Linux Mint 18 and Cinnamon. Everything ran out of the box on my Thinkpad; It comes with nice looking fonts that render well; The Mint-y theme is quite beautiful (IMHO); It's a Debian/Ubuntu derivative, so you get very good support and a lot of packages; High-dpi scaling works very nicely, especially since version 18. If you need a replacement for Alfred, you should have a look at Albert [0]. I use Albert in Linux Mint as a replacement for the Main menu. [0] https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert