Changed made to mind, sorry for the confusion.

I didn't know GNOME 3 and Unity were essentially the same, I thought Unity was something built from the ground up. I just tried GNOME 3 on my laptop with Fedora (ill probably use Debuan 7 now) and I actually like it a lot, it's fast and really neat. I used to hate it. Having no minus or plus buttons takes a bit to get used to but it's just really different and it feels complete to other desktop UIs or at least ones that I've tried. So I've narrowed it down now to Debian 7 (Fedora is really nice but I want to have the most software support etc), Ubuntu 13.04, and Linux Mint MATE. Thanks for all of your help guys (I don't think I want KDE anymore)

To the guy talkig about openSUSE, when I load it in via USB the options like "Start Opensuse" don't even show up, idk why.

Despite common believe, they aren't anymore. If you look at the Unity package you will find that there are no dependencies on Gnome 3, Unity is build using the Nux toolkit and uses Compiz as windowmanager. True is nonetheless that the Unity DE uses some (former) tools from Gnome, like the Nautilus file-manager (Canonical has forked their own version because of the feature removal that the Gnome developers have done to it).

Debian is a good choice, you can pretty much customized Gnome to do whatever you want by adding extensions.
you will have to add an extension for the minimized, maximized and close window options.

Good luck to you.

Change one setting and you can get them back.