Mint

At the Game Arts Guild we get the most powerful hardware we can afford by buying last-years laptops that haven't sold and go on sale to make room for the latest inventory. We then put Linux on them instead of Windows to get maximum performance (and so they aren't at all outdated.) I have two secrets that make this simple to do.

First and foremost, if your Linux machine has a problem where the screen freezes up for no apparent reason (a chronic problem for us in the past), do this:

(This is from: http://askubuntu.com/questions/760731/lenovo-thinkpad-11e-randomly-freezes-on-ubuntu-16-04 Note: to edit grub, you have to run the text editor from the command line with “sudo”. In Mint, you would open a terminal and type “sudo xed”.) 

Edit /etc/default/grub. Change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_idle.max_cstate=1 quiet splash" 

then in the terminal enter:

sudo update-grub

and restart the computer.

Second, use Mint Linux:

1. Your first clue is because it has been the most popular version of Linux on DistroWatch.com for a very long time. 
2. Your second clue is that though it is based on Ubuntu (the other most popular type of Linux) it has three major versions, two Ubuntu versions (MATE based on the older, faster, more established Gnome 2, vs. Cinnamon based on the slower, fancier Gnome 3,) and a Debian version, so that the Mint Linux community has a very clear definition of what their operating system experience should be like in spite of whatever desktop (MATE vs. Cinnamon) or back end (Ubuntu vs. Debian) they are using. Obviously you should be going with Mint MATE in most cases.
3. Anything lighter weight than Mint MATE (like say Xubuntu) comes at a great sacrifice (as with Xubuntu's Thunar file manager which in my experience cannot reliably either move large files around or see USB drives. Lubuntu? Worse.) The good news is that Android is turning into a real OS called "Andromeda," and most low end machines will not need a new OS for most users.
4. That Mint "definition of operating system experience" is ideal. The default set up is simple, familiar, easy to use, and conscious of screen real estate. It installs easily. It starts with the software that makes the most sense such as VLC for a media player and GIMP for an image editor. This Mint definition has also very stable, not changing with fads like Windows 8. Installing other software on it (such as the Chrome Browser) is easy.