Arch Linux or Mint Linux
open source, free and wonderful software.. they are both worthy.
Mint Linux is a great consumer operating system. It almost no maintenance in my experience.
it survived my mother opening 200+ windows inside firefox. It did have a fair amount of memory.
that may be more important than what you get, that you take care of your hardware situation.
three components matter more than any others...
- to have adequate memory
- harddrive space
- processor speed to meet your needs or frustration can ensue.
this is true of any system that you have.
Arch Linux is a great active user operating system.. It requires your attention.. but it gives you a wealth of information to deal with any problem. Ubuntu is great, but I find its complexity sometimes hard to follow. They are designing a system that is like a Apple Macintosh (which I used to love, until they starting locking it down) .. and to some degree this 'locking down' makes this work better. as the less 'moving parts' you have the easier it is to keep things together.
but arch linux is something different all together, it focuses on being minimialistic, and offering and opportunity to learn fully how your marchine works. You learn how to install software, manage packages (software), start system processes (and also restart/configure/maintain) and general good practices.
if you try and edit their wiki page you will be confront by gatekeepers. these folks are serious about keeping a clean wiki! at first I was a bit affronted at being challenged, but then I realized it was necessary for keeping a clean space! you might need to have a bit of a 'debate/fight' .. that ultimately is decided what is right and wrong. in computers... there is always a black and white answer. unless it depends on hardware... like my video card that apparently reports different ports being opened in different order every few boots. is it my linux driver or is the card really doing that? i don't know... i wrote a small script to accomodate the change... took 4 hours, but so worth it... to not boot into wack screens.
my computer is not particularly new. I've found getting upper/midgrade processor, a nice (but not crazy but not econ) motherboard is a good idea. I usually invest a bit in a graphics card. To me it is worth it to invest in things that get used everyday. I am going to enjoy this 200 dollar graphics card, and you know what I have, as I sit here using three beautiful monitors all linked to that one card. It can do games, but in linux the graphics support is... not always there, and I choose a poorly supported video card, because well... i didn't do my homework. Thankfully the folks in the linux world worked hard and gotten this situation better, having the original manufacturer withhold information necessary to write a good driver...
now I only buy open source friendly hardware. it makes life sooooo much easier. and it has long term (no one will 'stop supporting it') you can always... compile it yourself. that sounds hard.. and people act like they are doing something but more often than now what people are doing is this... and i shit you now this is all they are doing...
downloading source from somewhere... compiling it ... installing it...
some people out there are like oooooo exotic! it isn't. you get in a terminal window, and you type a few commands... those commands are in a read me, and you often just copy and paste them into the terminal window and hit enter.
example of commands necessary... $ is a command prompt (irony .. money is your god... lol)
$ make
$ make install
often, you'll need to be 'root' so you'd really type
$ make
$ sudo make install
and often to get the 'source code'... it will be on github... so you need a little command called git, but after you have it you can say this in terminal
$ git clone http://github.com/someuser/theirProjectName
you hit enter... and you download a folder with the entire project that you can now compile into a full program, or edit and change.