Which OS would YOU choose

Greetings,
I built a kodi box a few years ago and at the time I decided Using windows 7 would be the way I would go for an OS. I wanted a box that would play my video library as well as emulate the old games and eventually be able to support my PVR needs when I got around to building a PVR box. Well I recently built out a Mythtv box and got it up and running and whilst installing the add-on for it on my Kodi box I noticed the whole box seemed sluggish and was eating my entire 8 GB of RAM. It has been years since I last wiped the drive (I normally wipe my other computers every year or so. Anyways, I know this question has been asked before but it has been a long time and several improvements to Linux since I have seen the question asked so here it is…if you were to rebuild your system today (or the system listed below)…what OS would YOU use for if you could choose any one? When I built this box the first time I used windows because Linux didn’t seem to have a lot of support for game emulators and their accessories (Xbox 360 controllers, Wiimotes, etc) but it seems I just looked it up and Linux supports almost every one I use now. I am considering Linux instead of my copy of WIN7 because to me it feels less bloated than windows…and I figure I would have a lot less issues with “focus” on the Kodi program (IE: Windows loves to shrink my Kodi to give me some B*($SH!HF system message. I got it corrected with XBMClauncher but still annoying). My rough specs are below:

Quad-Core AMD A-Series APU Processor Model A8-5600K
Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-D3H AMD Socket FM2 A85X (Hudson D4) HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Motherboard
8 GB RAM
128 GB SSD
Using the built in geforce video (I bought a stand alone geforce card for it but it would never boot and seem to get red hot with it installed to I just stayed with onboard)

Any suggestions (or warnings) about switching to Linux (or staying with Windows and just reinstalling) would be much appreciated.

Acc