I'm a fan of archlinux running the cinnamon desktop environment. Archlinux might be a bit intense depending on your command line fu; you might want to try Linux

I'm a fan of archlinux running the cinnamon desktop environment. Archlinux might be a bit intense depending on your command line fu; you might want to try Linux Mint instead. Hardware wise, Lenovo also makes decent hardware. The Yoga 2 is a pretty solid machine comparable to most of Apple's offerings.