Hi Sawman,
Just my 2p worth.
With Linux there are two key decisions you have to make:
1. Which desktop you want; and
2. Which 'package manager'.
Desktop:
This is a flame hot topic in the linux community, but ultimately a matter of personal taste. For what its worth, I am most comfortable with Cinnamon, which comes natively with mint, but I use it with CENTOS. The main desktops are Gnome (used to use, but ditched), KDE, XFCE and Cinnamon
As an aside:
While I haven't tried it, Red Hat makes good money supporting a commercial version of Linux. Their free version is Fedora.
I disagree: Fedora is the community research version of Red Hat and as such is replaced every six months. CENTOS IS the Red hat commercial version just without the branding, as such it is supported over longer replacement cycles.
Package manager:
This is the major difference between flavours of linux. Most software in linux is installed using a package manager, which takes care of all dependencies and conflicts. Debian/ubuntu use apt (command line)/ Synaptic (GUI) whereas Fedora/CENTOS use rpm/yum.
Fedora/centos tend to have a larger ram/disk space requirement than the debian and relatives so that may be the better option in your particular case. I would definately echo the 'try the live usb option'. That will quickly identify if the distribution can identify all your peripherials like network cards etc.
HTH
EG