Ohh noo, I'm late to the partyyyy. Meh. Depends on what DE or WM you like, really. At least that's what I think of. I like Ubuntu, but it constantly breaks. OpenSUSE is some hot shit but Gnome3 is a bad choice for it and KDE lags a lot for me so I always choose IceWM. ARCH is awesome because it lets you take it, slap it around a little, break, fix, package, ship done. You have an OS you built from basically a terminal and a base system. Same goes for slackware, aside from being able to directly control everything possible on the board as well as in the os. It's a bit much to use straight up slackware (Again, opensuse, maybe even SLAX). If you want something REALLY WEIRD go try out Bodhi or something that uses openbox as it's WM. You will hate the menu's for like a week then you'll go to Ubuntu and go WHY CAN'T I CLICK AND HAVE THINGS. I'm serious on that by the way. If you want a failsafe Debian OS, try out puppy. Wanna go a step further? Get a spare ram stick for that laptop and burn that shit in there. You can then put it into any other laptop (the ram stick), have that set of memory as well as the OS, save files to the hard drive or to a USB or whatever, and then when the laptop starts farting out, get a different one with the same ram slot and pop the chip in there. I did that for like a year with desktops. It was great. I had a 512 ram stick adn I had some desktops from the high school that I had fixed up while the HS had the same computers. I could go to school with these ram sticks, and each terminal that ran windows that I knew was assigned to me I'd just pop them in there. I made each of the OS's talk to each other at home and so through rootkitting I could save a 2KB file, or whatever, on one machine, and the other machines would get an 80 secong WOL (wake on lan) signal and get the same file, kind of like drop box. They also pinged home by the time I was done so that's also how I saved my schedule. It's some really fun stuff you can di if you have that level of need. But yeah, that's my experience.
