I'm a mint (cinnamon) user at present and pretty happy with it. my laptop isn't brand new as it was donated by a mate who upgraded his, and it just seems to work without too much pfaffing about, which i like. installing additional software is as i'm sure you know super easy - especially if it comes as a deb package, since it is derived from the debian distro, via ubuntu.

i think currently ubuntu and mint are the top two distros, and if i were looking at linux for the first time id definitely go for one or the other, or even both with a dual boot option