I have a Windows 7/Ubuntu dual boot on my laptop, and it's great. I really only use Windows 7 these days for gaming and some applications not accessible under Ubuntu.

Other than that, I spend a lot of my time in Ubuntu. LibreOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird are all great, among lots of other great apps. The Unity interface was a bit off-putting at first, but I've got used to it.

I prefer KDE, and I like openSUSE. But I'm not sure I'd like them on a laptop. Keeping things uncomplicated is a great virtue on laptops. CentOS is as uncomplicated as it gets.

I chose to start with the KDE edition of Mint...

Now I have a Laptop running Linux. No hassle to download... No hassle to make a DVD... No hassle to install... all devices running properly, including the on-board wireless networking card...

That was a fantastic end user experience.

Further, it seems quite intuitive. I can "get under the hood" easily. It is fully loaded with useful apps. I'm gonna enjoy exploring this OS.

Thanks again. :-)

Have a lot of fun! ;-)

you should also think about scanning over the package manager. Mint has kinda sort two. The synaptic package manager and "software manager" which is more of a simplified way to browsing available applications(which is probably where you should start. ) You will likely find even more stuff to explore.

if your up for it fire up a term and explore basic console navigation tools. Like windows they aren't really necessary most of the time, but its still good and useful to know the basics.

Some quick useful things are
the default key combo for a task manager like program in KDE is Ctrl+Esc
You can switch and log on to several command line environments simply by pressing ctrl+alt+f1 - F6. Switch back by ctrl+alt+F7
in a term ps -e will list processes and kill # will manually kill a process.
Ctrl+alt+backspace will forcibly reboot the graphics system. Kind of like rebooting the computer without actually having to reboot everything.
hold down alt to move window around without clicking their title bar.
type glxgears from a command prompt to launch a simple quick graphics test to find out what kind of performance you are getting.
Folders are hidden by starting with a "."

things you will hopefully never need to mess with but might hear about sometimes are the xorg.confg file and fstab.