Linux Mint gets my vote
I use this for my main OS as I'm a UNIX/Linux sysadmin by trade. Having said that, I've persuaded some of the people who I've fixed laptops/PCs for in the past to have Linux installed as a backup in case it all goes mammaries. Two out of those five people now exclusively use Mint. It came in very handy when one person's PC wouldn't boot and their daughter had some important stuff to submit to school for homework. They were able to boot into Linux, mount the Windows partition (easy under the file manager application) and then open LibreOffice to edit/save the document.
You can also run Linux Mint as the main OS in the background and use VirtualBox to install whichever Windows client OS you want. Works extremely well. When run in 'seamless mode', it appears to be a Windows desktop and you can't tell the difference.
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