I tried Mint 15, have downloaded a bunch of Mint 17 versions on a Dell Dimension 8200 to see how well they worked (Mate, Xcfe, Debian, and latest, KDE version.) On more powerful machines, I use Cinnamon, but maybe I will decide upon KDE, as that distro is so nice!

Programming for 40 years now (egads!). c (not c++), perl, and shell programming are my main time consumers.