[auxym]

Of the ones I've tried recently, I liked manjaro a lot. It's based on Arch, so you get cutting-edge software, access to the AUR (really great) and good default configuration (with vanilla arch you have to set up everything yourself). It has the standard DE's, I used xfce. You might want to check out Korora, it also looks pretty cool.

DE-wise, KDE's Plasma5 and LXQt both look pretty cool, though not many distros have them yet.

[bjwbell]

+1 on Manjaro. I used Ubuntu but got sick of their changing the UI EVERY couple years. Switched to Manjaro 6 months ago & it's soo much better. No crazy shit like Ubuntu's forked kernel (they had to backport Intel's BDW gfx driver recently). Just plain upstream packages nicely configured to install. As a dev it's wonderful.