^These. Xubuntu 13.10 is absolutely, magnificently, stunningly beautiful and functional to ME (except that one volume control bug, which i hope will be fixed soon).
ubuntu 13.10 x64 here. best thing about it is that whenever you got a problem, google will always gave you some answer. Best for a Linux noob like me.
I've try many distro, two Linux distributions i think is the best is : 1. Linux Mint (Download the Mate version) 2. Linux Deepin (beautifull OS with so many features)
Since you mentioned it, I looked the webpage over and gave it a non-install run. It *is* a very nice layout - but I wasn't really impressed. Sticking with Mint 15 Cinnamon for now. I do really like that there are literally tons of these distros around to try out!
On my daily driver, I currently use Mint 13 LTS with Mate desktop. On my test box I am using Mint 15 Cinnamon. I believe Cinnamon has matured enough that I can switch to it on the daily driver when the next LTS version is released. On old machines I currently favor Lxle, a modified LTS version of Lubuntu. I was sad to see Mint drop the LXDE desktop but at least now there is a very good substitute.
After I installed and running a lot of Linux and Unix distro's I can chose Ubuntu 14.04 not because interface or more speed ,just because works perfectly with all my devices. Ubuntu is Windows 7 from Linux!
...over the years I played around with many distributions from Arch Linux to Zorin and almost everything in between lol Settled for #! CrunchBang and SolidX (both based on Debian) Still playing around with Ubuntu (Debian), *ditched Unity, prefer 'GNOME classic desktop'* and Chromium OS.