Nona.
I recommend Linux lite. I actually left mint when I realized that mint is not respoecting their users on their web forum. That is a huge turn off for me. So now I am running linux lite. It is quick and everything works. I'd try that.
www.linuxliteos.com
It's good to try out different distros - there are literally thousands of them out there - they are incredibly verstatile and customised to meet people's needs. But I agree with nonaeroterraqueous, the constant splintering of distros does hinder development. There are much fewer people maintaining the smaller distros, development tends to be much slower, and they don't tend to stick around for very long. The larger distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora and Opensuse, have many more developers working on them and have significant commercial backing and sponsorship by the likes of Canonical, IBM/RedHat, and Novell, which are a major driving force for innovation.
Fundamentally every version or "flavour" of Linux works in the same way. The main differences are the kernel version used, the package manager, the repositories, the installer, and possibly a few homegrown apps. Other things such the choice of desktop environment, wallpaper, theming and branding can be changed very easily. If you don't like the DE, you can install another. For instance, you can make your computer look and behave exactly like Ubuntu simply by downloading Gnome Shell, the wallpaper, adding a few shell extensions and changing the GTK and icon theme. No one would notice the difference.
A lot of distros target specific users. There are some like Ubuntu, Zorin OS, Linux Mint and Elementary which are designed to reduce the learning curve for people switching to Linux. Codecs and hardware drivers are preinstalled, subpixel font rendering is configured by default. You have a ready to use system which requires no further configuration once installed. A lot of people claim that some distros are tailored towards more "advanced users", but in reality they are simply systems providing a more basic set-up allowing users to tweak and configure the system to their requirements. You can still add the codecs, adjust the fonts, add third party repos, download drivers, etc. it just takes a little more work to get things how you want them.
