If you thought Fedora was a good distro to try, but, didn't like Gnome 3, you could install Fedora with the KDE desktop. It's my 2nd favorite distro next to siduction.

Fedora does have Eclipse (yum install eclipse), as well as many other dev environments. It's not a bad choice, but as portaro said, Ubuntu and Debian have similar capabilities.

How are you attaching to the internet now? Do you have a router? If both machines are connected to the same router (wired or wireless), you should be able to access the files over the network.

I'm not familiar with Unity on Ubuntu, so I can't give you a first hand experience, but, you should be able to find desktop sharing software, or file sharing software in your Ubuntu repos.

You could also mount a partition that is on machine 1 from machine 2. You could also ssh from one machine into another, or use sshfs for mounting. If you just want to copy a file from one machine to another you can use scp.

There's no need to settle for usb sticks or google-docs, although sometimes they are the easier solution. It depends on how you want to share the files.

Welcome Izzy1512, the more the merrier. Visiting and seeing if you can answer questions is great. We need more folks helping out and sharing knowledge. It doesn't matter what your experience, if you can help great. Hopefully we'll return the favor.

I second mfilpot's recommendation of Digikam. While it doesn't scan the whole disk for photos, it's easy to point it and collect photos from any folder.

Most of the distros you listed will install automatically and set up grub for you. BUT, you will have to create the space on your hard disk in order to do so.

When I've done it I've run defrag twice, then used the windows partitioner to shrink the largest Windows partition (usually the data partition). Once you have empty space, everything else will run automatically.

Some Linux installers will allow you to shrink partitions while doing the install, but, it's safer to let windows do it itself.

Welcome to the forums silex89, sorry for the belated welcome. Guess we missed a few posts down here. Please keep your eyes on the forum and share your knowledge.