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You could run ubuntu or debian on it. Although probably best to stick with raspbian for the GPU support. Ubuntu has a mate version that's probably a lot like mint.
a full desktop with the PI? forget it. Its only valuable for commandline. If you need a cheap PC, buy a second hand PC in order to have a full desktop experience. I have 2x PIs with raspbian without full desktop (one as print/data server; the second one was few time ago as webcam server).
Its only just feasible to run a GUI on a pi - but it can be done.
There is a free package that includes Mathematica - a huge program that runs desperately slowly.
It is also possible to run a GUI with VNC server.
But it makes much more sense to just stick to ssh.
I ran a GUI on the B (pre-B+). Granted that you have to wait for a browser to launch and you're probably not doing much beyond irc and light web browsing (imgur / flickr). I even had the B do a povray render. Which took 30 minutes on the B and 3 minutes on an old amd x2 1.9GHz desktop. With the pi 2 being 6x's the computes, it almost gives my hp stream 11 a run for the money.
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