My not-Windows partition has been through a lot of different Linux flavors.
Fedora, IMHO, is quite variable in useability between different versions, depending on how bleeding edge the latest things are.
Linux Mint is nice, although I’ve had occasional hardware problems. Linux Mint also has a distribution that is Debian based, called LMDE. The nice thing about that is that it is a “rolling” distribution—meaning you don’t have to update your system every six or nine months to stay on top of things. You just do incremental updates.
So, I asked myself, “Why not go right to Debian?” And, that is another viable choice. Right now I’m running the Debian “testing” distribution with the lightweight XFCE desktop. Very nice, and aside from incremental updates, I expect it to have a life of several years. As a bonus, it’s easy to change the desktop system to KDE, Gnome, or whatever.
I've been running Fedora as my sole environment on my laptops since 2003--Fedora Core 1. A few versions I have totally skipped due to reviews. F20, though, seems to be just about perfect so far.