[Aeolos]

After hopping through every distro you mentioned, I ended up with Arch, which I've been running happily for several years now in VMs, desktops, laptops and even my retina macbook pro. Up to date kernels and drivers means I no longer have to deal with the pain of proprietary GPU drivers (Mesa3d is already better than the OSX drivers and rapidly improving).

The initial setup takes about an hour if you've never done it before (I keep the installation guide open on my tablet and go through it step by step.) Once you've done it once, reinstalling takes maybe 15 minutes on a fast internet connection.

That said, if you've decided your tinkering days are over, then your best bet is OSX. Myself, I have to use OSX, Windows and Linux for dev work, and Arch is the only distro I can tolerate these days. The lack of a graphical installer means it's certainly not for everyone, however, once the initial setup it's a breath of fresh air, compared to the constant buginess of Ubuntu and ($god forbid) Fedora.