I am a C++ programmer from Germany, who finally turned away from Windows (7), so that I will mainly use Linux (Mint) from now on. Why Mint? Well, my first encounter with Linux years ago was with Ubuntu. It was that time where Ubuntu had those two nice panels (top + bottom) with its default desktop manager and was quite easy to use. When I was retrying Linux months ago, again using Ubuntu, I was surprised of its new "Unity". Yeah, it looks somehow interesting, but... I couldn't easily configure it like I wanted (moving the panel to the bottom as an example), and also the default scrollbar was irritating me, which could only be fixed with a special "hack" and there are more things I didn't like, and changing the desktop manager didn't work quite well either.
So, I found out that Mint (with Cinnamon) was quite what I was looking for. Easy to use desktop environment, single panel per default what I liked, and you can change the theme, icons etc. quite easily yourself (as I found out where the files are stored). So, for example, I compiled my very custom icon theme, and I started to edit the Mint's default theme CSS style, as it is already quite close to what I really like. And, I also changed the window decoration very easily, and I can even rearrange the icons in the title bar.
Well, that's already a little bit. If you are interested in more information, just ask
