Need help finding a distro

[arkanabar]

I'm going to suggest ditching eye candy for functionality. I like Ubuntu, but for the interface. My preference runs towards ubuntu spins with lighter DEs or even just a window manager. Right now, my recommendations for you are Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Madbox, or SalentOS, since you don't want to fool with e17 (truth be told, neither do I). If Ubuntu and the like handle your hardware well, give those lighter interface spins a try.

[leclerc65]

Hi guys,
It seems after a lot of searching, I've found why there's so much sluggishness and across so many distros even on my powerful hardware. It's because of bugs.

I had also been through this until my brother in law found out that my Motherboard's Bios was not up-to-date. My Quad-Core AMD 2200MHz per core show only 1100Mhz in the System Monitor.

[fullmetalgerbil]

I dunno, I saw some Distrowatch suggestions and that's always a good resource when you're poking around for distributions. You also might want to try linuxquestions.org as they have a pretty good review section and friendly forums.
I'm far from some kind of expert, however I've had great success with AntiX on machines with gronky hardware issues. Slackware, too is good in that way, but it's kind of a biting off a big piece to chew as far as configurimicating it all if you're just getting your flippers wet with Linux. But it gives you a lot of control over what you want in your installation.
Someone mentioned using Mint with the Cinnamon DE and stripping it out a bit, and that sounds good. I'd suggest that if you go with that, try the Mint 13 LTS, as 14 isn't their best release.
Sometimes, you know, it can all be a bit overwhelming-all the choices. There's a whole bunch of distributions, but (thankfully) NONE of them are going to give you an exact Windows user experience. The thing with Linux, and I'm sure there's like Authorities on The Subject who will disagree with me, but even in this day and age there's a certain degree of interplay-what used to be called "learning curve"-where it's like you can't just go out and "pick the perfect distro" all the time. You're not really supposed to be able to do that, exactly. It's still one of those things where you have to find what works well with your hardware...and then, you "make it perfect" by choosing what you want to use with it-KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Window Maker...like, whatever. Plus all the bijillions of packages and adaptations and tweaks and so forth you can take to it.
So, you know, you will find something that works well with your hardware. But beyond that it's on you to make it perfect for you.
Oh, and that person who was griping about your paragraph spacing...this is the first time in probably four or five years I've even been on this forum, and it's interesting that thay've let the grammar trolls suddenly run amok. For a second there I thought I was on the Debian forums.