I've been running Xubuntu on dual boot for a while but I'm thinking of wiping out my entire Windows partition and only use Linux. Any other alternatives you would recommend? I've tried Lubuntu before, which is lighter weight, but the graphical interface is pretty ugly. I do want some aesthetics but I'm only gonna use this laptop for programming. I guess my best bet is to stick with Xubuntu? I do want to try Linux Mint though.

Here are the specs of my laptop..It has about 250 gb of space.

The good thing about Linux Distros is that you can install, try and if needed throw them away.
I think it depends which distro fits your needs.
Do you need a GUI?

If you want to keep it easy / using your experiance with Ubuntu then stay at Ubuntu or go for Debian.
Otherwise go the leight weight way and try ArchLinux.

>old laptop
>almost can run gta5

lolwut?

Really anything will work. Go with ubuntu for ease of mind and everything working out of the box

I have no specific requirements in mind other than with programs that are more resource intensive such as Android development, I'll use my desktop PC. I'd like my computer to run as smooth as possible though so speed is a factor.

You mean GUI as in the overall graphical environment? I've ran the regular Ubuntu before and I just enjoyed the XFCE version of it better because of how smooth it ran even though they're more or less the same thing. I haven't tried Debian yet. ArchLinux has a learning curve to it, right? It requires you to set up your own configuration; I'm not sure if I'm interested in that.

You can try gentoo. Since each application and the kernel itself are compiled locally you can specify optimized flags to make it run better, although I haven't seen much of a difference on newer machines.

Flux box is also a nice lightweight manager.

I would recommend Gentoo for the beginner, maybe Arch or Slackware, something to get you started. Xubuntu and all of those African Linux versions won't teach you anything, they're just diet versions of Linux made for casuals.

so i've narrowed down to the following suggestions (gentoo and archlinux) because i really want to learn linux.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/want-to-learn-linux-these-four-distros-will-take-you-from-beginner-to-pro/

this person recommends to learn archlinux first...so in the future if i wanna transfer over my hard drive from archlinux to gentoo, how would i go about this without having to backup all my files?

There's a lot of time to invest in the ideal setup. I would choose one and stick with it rather than swap over.

With my gentoo install on my laptop I put in about 1-2 hours a day for 2 weeks before I had it in a comfortable usable state (that I could actually be productive on). I haven't used arch myself but I would assume it is about the same.

It also depends on how nit picky you are. If you just want a usable machine with gentoo (no desktop environment or window manager) you can get a working command line install done within a few hours if you are comfortable with the process or use the genconfig application (probably 3-4 if you are not experienced with configuring your own kernel).

Taking in the compile times of applications for having a DE or WM you are probably looking at another couple of hours. On my I5 laptop it took about 30 minutes to compile xorg, and another 20 or so for conky, rxvt and fluxbox. Then unless you install the firefox or chromium binary you are looking at another hour or so to compile one of those.

Most of my time was spent towards compiling software and writing bash wrappers around software to do specific tasks for me such as uploading a scrot screenshot to imgur, work with mplayer in the framebuffer, or display pdf/images in the frame buffer.

If you're looking something to get up and running fast with minimal time investment I would look at xubuntu or something. If you want something with compiled packages thats a minimal install that you can build up slowly go with debian.

If you want to install and configure every aspect of your OS then go with arch or gentoo. You will handle everything from partitioning, to configuration kernel features, to managing how your applications are specifically compiled.

is there a way for me to try out gentoo or archlinux? but there's no point in "trying them out" because whatever you configured that day will be erased once you unmount your OS?

If you are using the live disk yes that is the case.

Although if you are going to try one of them out you will want to install them to the hard drive because just using the live disk wont give you a full feel for gentoo since it behaves like any other linux os at the command line.

If you want some sort of prepackaged gentoo shit you can look at funtoo I guess.

I personally think you are confusing something if you want to "try out" an distro like gentoo, because there is nothing to "try out". Gentoo is a minimal install which out build up from the ground. There are no DE or WM, no tools, no nothing besides you and the GNU standard applications. It's not like flavors of ubuntu where you can hop between them and look at all the pretty and useless features gnome, kde, xfce and the like implement.