First, I did not move everything; I only moved my dev enviroment. I have things bound to OS X and I can't say goodbye just yet entirely. But with everything in a VM I have a nice walled garden that i know will work, and I can update OSX with less hesitation as most of my time is spent in the safe world of the VM.
It also makes it easy for me to copy it over to my laptop (I'm on an iMac) and continue what I was working on from there; or to just reboot into windows and play some PC games. And being able to do branching at a machine level can come in handy too.
Anyway. To answer your questions about distros. I started with centos but it does not appear to be a great desktop OS, and chrome doesn't even support it. But I also noticed the font renderings in the browser were notably crappier, and ubuntu has a package to make that not suck so much.
So, I went with linux mint. I do NOT like the fact that the firefox it comes with prevents you from using google as your search engine (at all) because mint wants a cut of google's profits; so you simply can't use it. That still gets under my skin. But you can download Firefox directly and get around that, which is what I did.
But basically, anything ubuntu based. as much as I otherwise dislike ubuntu, it'll equate to the least tinkering required.
Otherwise my apps haven't really changed - everything I used regularly in OSX is in linux.
Some of the copy/paste behavior is nutty, but I haven't looked into tuning that yet to be honest.
But otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the move and the solution. If OSX gets worse I can move more into the VM.