I recently put a "lightweight Ubuntu-based Linux distro" on my gf's underpowered laptop. It really sucked. Hardware support was shot, software selection is limi

I recently put a "lightweight Ubuntu-based Linux distro" on my gf's underpowered laptop. It really sucked. Hardware support was shot, software selection is limiting, and in general it's just not set up the way the rest of us expect. Get a standard distro, even if it might not be the ultra-fastest build out there. All the help forum search results you will find are based on the standard distros, and this will make it easier to fix problems and learn quickly. You honestly start with something incredibly common like Debian, Ubuntu (both mostly the same but with important differences in usability) or Fedora. The simplest way to try different distros is to make /home a separate partition for your user files; everything else is disposable. If you have a lot of time on your hands, try LFS. If you want to see a stripped-down but not "minimalist" distro, try Slackware. If you want to install lots of distros and try them out one by one, use QEMU, VMware Player, VirtualBox, etc and install each one and play with it, but hardware-specific changes you'll only find by installing it natively. You are actually incredibly lucky to be using a 6 year old machine. The newer the machine, the less Linux support there is for it. I recently got back to Linux with some modern laptops and it was a friggin' nightmare to get everything working. One distro's installer didn't properly support the naming convention for a hard drive controller. A bunch of the media keys aren't supported. Getting hybrid graphics to work took days. Apparently my wifi card has unfixable problems with 802.11n networks in Linux. And I am still unable to connect to a bluetooth headset. Stick to the old hardware, try different web browsers until you find one that won't crash with only 1GB of RAM, and have fun!