@frank ly
Mint is fresh for me here too on an Asus laptop. I am quite happy with my Asus K53 and LMDE which has both cinnamon and mate desktops installed. I use the latter. It has i5 (dual core) on it and builds my Debian kernels from source for 45 minutes (ARM cross compilation takes only 10 minutes though). Barely ever get to the half of the 8 gigs o'RAM. A great Linux laptop it is.. perhaps only needs a new battery for now. Awaiting a replacement from ebay costing $14 for me.
This is not a new machine (4-5 years now) , however it's almost perfect for my needs. Came with EUFI option, while not active with Windows 7. Installing GNU/Linux was much more straightforward back then, can't comment on how the preinstalled Windows was bloated, though...