While I still believe that CentOS with all it’s locked down design is best for the average home/home-office user, it’s too confining for someone like me. Thus, I run Debian on all of my systems. On newer laptops, in particular, I recommend Debian 8. If you really need a full desktop environment, select the KDE desktop during installation. Or, you can just download the KDE installer CD — typically you’ll want 64-bit, but for older machines, maybe the standard 32-bit (links current as of this writing).
On 64-bit, I now recommend you forgo the WINE installation and just run the free VMWare Player or for something simpler, try Virtual Box supplied by Debian itself. I’ve already covered the installation of both on previous blog posts. The only thing I note is that, on KDE, the installer run as root will be console only. It’s not that hard to follow if you have the kernel headers and build-essential packages installed.
At any rate, if you have a little more time and patience to learn Linux, it’s very hard to beat the latest release of Debian 8.
