I've always felt linux is much more responsive than windows. Even gaming, I get better framerates in Wine. The distro doesn't matter too much to me as I've tried a few and always just end up stripping the default programs for my creature comforts. To this end I like arch linux, but if I'm going for a quick setup will use Ubuntu (wubi installer is nice). My favorite desktop is XFCE and I can't stand the new Gnome or KDE even though I love Qt.
I don't think your choice of distro will effect java too much (altho a new version of the JDK [not the JRE which annoyingly bugs you to update almost weekly] was just released and might not have packages for every obscure distro yet)
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