So over the past 9 months, I've gone from Win 7 to Linux Mint to Win 8.1 to Win 10 (I joined the insider program at build 10162). I really like Win 10 (although not as much as Win 8.1 which is my favorite Windows to date), Cortana integration and the new notification center are probably the features I enjoy the most but I also like the material design. However I started getting more and more frustrated with the OS the past few weeks, it's still incredibly rough around the edges. Edge hangs a lot, some game apps do not run very well, the email app is a disaster, the built in video player cannot handle subtitles properly and the OS itself is a bigger resource hog than Win 8.1 (not by that much but still). Yesterday the camel's back finally broke. I downloaded the VLC media player app from the store and unbelievably it couldn't handle any of the movie files I threw at it (permanent green bar at the bottom + colors completely off). I went back to the store and decided to try another trusted video app, GOM player. With this one the image froze randomly even though the audio worked fine. That was it I got really fed up and started looking around for a different OS.
Elementary OS was a natural choice for me, I love simplicity, minimalism and efficiency. This OS is a gem. Literally. Of all the OS's I've tried, Elementary is hands down my favorite. The 64bit version ISO is only around 850 MB!! Download was fast and installation was super easy (complete noob level). Everything worked out of the box (no hardware/driver issues). The OS comes only with essentials apps but you have access to Ubuntu's software center with over 70,000 apps.
I have 4 GB of ram on my machine and Win 10 64 bit at rest (no apps running other than task manager) takes up 30-31% of that. Elementary with browser opened - 1 tab (103 MB) + email app running (123 MB) + task manager, uses around 16%
The only thing that does not work very well is the default browser Midori, it's lightweight and fast but crashes when under pressure from demanding sites. I've downloaded Chromium from the store. Problem solved + Chromium is awesome (you can sign in with your Google account and have all your tabs and bookmarks synced).
Final verdict - Elementary OS is probably one of the most noob-friendly Linux distros out there (it's been designed in such a way as to minimize the need for the terminal). It's an extremely polished and efficient OS and a total eye candy (it looks absolutely gorgeous!!). I would totally recommend Elementary to beginners who want to try something new and are not overly concerned with games and mainstream software
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
EDIT - My webcam, microphone, usb sticks and bluetooth dongle worked on first boot without requiring any tweaking
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)