First thing you need to do is buy a bunch of thigh-high socks, then try those on and feel which one feels right for you. Then post your legs with those on and we will tell you in the comments which distro to run.

Spoiler: It’s Arch btw

Mint rather than Ubuntu surely, if you want a debian base. If you prefer something Fedora-based, I hear good things about Bazzite

Hannah Montana Linux, obviously

I’ve been using Debian. I’ve never understood the attraction of Ubuntu, which is basically a corporate relabel of Debian. If I were really cool, I’d presumably go for Nix or Guix. Maybe someday. I switched from Fedora to Debian some years ago over some drama whose details I’ve forgotten, and have been happy with the move. Arch tries to be more up to date with everything and I guess that’s good for some users, but I like stuff that is stable, with an upgrade every few years.

I reccomend fedora, great compromise between stability and modern features

With a machine like that, you’re firmly in the mainstream of linux. Almost any distro will run well on it, so selection is a matter of taste.

Debian is a solid, conservative option, though they have a reputation of lagging behind other distros in terms of software versions. I do like arch, their wiki is first rate. It has the reputation of being finicky but I’ve always found it pretty straightforward. Great for the extensive docs and not trying to insulate you from the system.

I personally would avoid ubuntu these days, they seem to be leaning into the Ubuntu Way for things like installing software. A bit lock-in ish for me.

FWIW I’m running nixos on my thinkpads, works great. Nixos is not to be undertaken lightly, there’s a lot to learn and docs are meh. Stability is second to none, and the declarative configuration management makes it great for easing into devops.

Depends on what you’re looking for. I’m guessing you’re more of neophyte to Linux or you probably wouldn’t be asking.

I always recommend Linux Mint to newbies. It’s very user friendly (more so than windows 11 imo), and it’s a spin off of Ubuntu, so it’s got great support behind it.

Ubuntu itself is a spin off of a distro called Debian, so if you ever have problems with Linux Mint and you can’t find an answer on the very helpful Linux Mint forums, you could always search for your answer on Ubuntu’s forums, or Debian’s.

Arch based distros are better for newer hardware because it’s bleeding edge, but that laptop looks so old that you probably wouldn’t need anything like that.

If you’re using this laptop to do work, then Mint or Zorin can’t be beat. They have user-friendly interfaces, they have stable packages meaning updates are unlikely to break your OS, and you can still install new software through Flatpak and Snap.

Once installed, install Librewolf for web browsing, VLC for video playback, OnlyOffice for MS Office files, and any other software you need from the built-in software store. If you choose Mint then you need to turn on unverified Flatpaks in the software store for everything to appear.

Also, with the original 1 x 4 GB of RAM and mechanical hard drive, this laptop will be slow with a modern OS, so I recommend upgrading it to 8 GB RAM (2 x 4 GB is recommended for dual channel speed) and an SSD beforehand.

I got a very recent Thinkpad and it apparently has official support for Ubuntu and Fedora. I went with Fedora KDE.

Unrelated but relevant advice: Is this a refurbished laptop?

1. Make sure to run Lenovo Diagnostics software; you can get it from official Lenovo website and check for any hardware issues during the stress testing.
2. Check if BIOS password is removed.
3. Test for memory RAM errors: disable secure boot in BIOS, then run Memtest86 test via a bootable USB to check for any memory errors.

If you don’t upgrade the RAM, go with Linux Mint with the MATE desktop. If you do upgrade to 8GB RAM, probably LMDE? You don’t need to be on a bleeding edge kernel with a Windows 8 era laptop, modern optimizations will not affect perf much.

What is the usecase?

If this is a primary driver for things like work or your primary personal email/web/productivity machine, IMO you want Fedora for stability

If this will be for games, there are good dedicated distros (consider Batocera if you love retro!)

Nice Thinkpad! I recently installed Linux Mint Debian Edition on one of the more recent Thinkpads. But the other suggestions here are fine as well. Mind an older Laptop with a spinning harddisk inside might not be as snappy as a people expect these days.

I use CachyOS on my X220 with btrfs and lzo as disk compression (lzo is very good on old cpus and makes the SSD go really fast). But I think any distro could be good on that hardware.

As a side note, I would really like an x86_64-v2 distro, people jumped from no additional instructions to v3 in no time, but these thinkpads and older pcs could really shine with that kind of optimization.

I like Mint but really most major distros are fine these days.