Right now, I am using Lubuntu 14.04 LTS on my laptop with Windows 8.1 for a few games that don't run well on Wine(Trying to get the best from this crappy CPU, I could run XFCE, but LXDE/Lubuntu's CPU usage is just a little bit lower.), so far so good, Lubuntu is a bit rough on the edge with my laptop, but everything else works fine.(Example: Since it got both internal speakers and a HDMI output, it outputs by default on the HDMI output, so I need to get PulseAudio + its GUI, pavucontrol, to fix that)
I recommend using Ubuntu or Linux Mint, Ubuntu is getting kinda bloated and Mint works out of the box anyway, so I always pick the latter. Fedora is pretty interesting too, but there isn't a Long Term Support release, so I don't think I will ever use it as my main OS.