Mint would probably be the safest bet. You could also take a look at Manjaro XFCE, though Manjaro is a bit more advanced than what it sounds like you’re looking for. There’s also Zorin OS with their “lite” version which runs a modified XFCE that would probably work for your needs.

However, if you go for Mint, I’d definitely go for XFCE. I’ve never used labwc myself and I’m more of a Plasma guy, but XFCE is, in my own experience, a very good DE for a low-spec system. With the increasing spread of Wayland, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Wayland support on XFCE in the future. Cinnamon actually has an experimental Wayland version and it’s not as resource-heavy as some might think I have a 2012 laptop running Mint Cinnamon and it runs surprisingly well on that system. Then again, if you’re just going for a minimalist installation, it’s not necessary.

I would not say Fedora is hard to install and maintain. The biggest issue by far is a setup hurdle for getting “non-free packages” enabled – Fedora (and a few other distros) is a “FOSS-only” distribution, meaning they don’t include anything by default that is not “free, open-source software.” That means media codecs for playing popular audio and video file formats, web browsers like Chrome (I would recommend migrating away from this platform if you’re using it) and anything else that’s “proprietary software.”

There are ways to enable access to this software, but it requires configuring your software package repositories to point to them. It’s not hard, just something to keep in mind.

Linux Mint is a great choice for newcomers to the space – it includes access to non-free software OOTB, has sane default applications on all of its “flavors” with their separate desktop environments, provides decent utilities for configuring your system graphically without blocking you from learning how to do so by config file or terminal should you want to learn. It stays decently up-to-date with packages, you won’t be on the bleeding edge but that’s not a bad thing. If you aren’t doing intense activities (gaming, video editing, etc) having the absolute latest packages won’t really matter to you. It still gets security updates, so you’re good there. It’s a well documented distro with a friendly community and forum if you run into trouble with anything. All around a really solid choice, and would be my first recommendation for someone not looking to do any heavy gaming or other specialized work on their PC.

XFCE is my desktop environment of choice. Not only is it lightweight, it also comes with some of the better desktop environment defaults, in my opinion. Linux Mint will theme it nicely upon install, but it’s a long-standing DE that has a huge backlog of support for customization and “beautifying” your install however you like. Lots of themes and cursor options for those who care, all without pushing your resources. It’s a traditional desktop paradigm, so it won’t try and force you to interact with your PC in new and unusual ways (looking at you, GNOME, you weirdo). It just… Gets out of your way and lets you use your PC the way you’re used to.

Linux Mint + XFCE is my recommendation, for sure.

When in doubt: Linux Mint.

You can find something more suitable for your need later on, but this should give you a baseline experience.

I would steer clear of labwc or other minimalist WMs when you’re just getting started. In fact, try nothing but the basics first.

My advice is don’t take any advice. Just download the ones you are most interested in and then flash and try one by one until you feel at home.

As a complete newbie with those specs, I’d try Mint Xfce edition.

You are thinking too hard I think in the wrong direction. Use Mint unless you have a strong feeling/need for something else. In which case, use that. Choice of first distro is not really that important. Pick a popular one and if it’s wrong for you, you’ll figure it out.

What you haven’t mentioned is any research you have done regarding hardware support/compatibility for your specific device. I searched the specs you listed and it came up with some netbooks like CB012DX. I actually have an older, shittier version of this device running a debian derivative. (Mint is also in the debian family FYI.) And I’ve had fun installing various linuxes on even older, shittier chromenetbooks over the years.

Assuming yours is in this ballpark, I have one really important piece of advice for you. Before you think anymore about it, download ISOs of your top 1 or 3 distro choices, flash them to USB and attempt to boot. These super cheap devices cut corners on components. It is not unlikely that you will have some hardware that either doesn’t have open source drivers, or has some sort of theoretical support that will be too esoteric for you to implement at your current skill level. It is quite common on these devices that everything works fine except networking or something like that. So you might be able to exclude some of your choices based on that. Try to find a distro that works reasonably well out of the box.

You should find the various names your device goes by

As you have probably read, booting from a flashed USB is non-destructive of you normal system (unless you choose to format your disk or something of course). Assuming you have no issues booting, try out all the hardware features you have like: trackpad (different kinds of click, drag, zoom etc), ethernet, wireless (2.4 + 5ghz network), bluetooth, speakers, headphones, external input device, external displays, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, all keys and buttons, cameras, mics, sensors, keyboard lights. Any external devices you like to use: mice, keyboards, dongles, should also be included. I suggest making a list and systematically checking each item.

You can use this amazing tool called ventoy to flash one USB boot drive to have multiple distros available. You can even keep a windows ISO on there. It will even let you reserve a portion of the disk for persistent storage. Ventoy substantially improves this whole process so you don’t have to have 10 different USB disks floating around. It is well designed and straight forward to use.

So on my current netbook, I was lucky that networking has been no problem. people with a slightly different model have to use an external wifi dongle (and not all wifi dongles are compatible with linux). I have never gotten anything form the speakers, but they might have arrived broken, apparently it’s pretty easy to blow out the speakers and I didn’t test while ChromeOS was still installed. Using an arch-based distro, the touch screen worked but now in Debian it doesn’t. I don’t really care about that. I really wanted Bluetooth to work and I couldn’t for the longest time til one day it just magically solved itself and I haven’t reinstalled since then because I am not sure I’d be able to re-solve it.

The other piece of advice has to do with storage. Depending what software you run, it can require a bit of space. 64gb could be gone quickly. This will be somewhat controversial (for good reason) but I always end up devoting the full eMMC to the system partition and having a permanently mounted SD card for /home, user storage and maybe even some of the system temp directories. This goes against common advice because SD cards are more prone to failure. So you need to have a good backup plan or just accept the risk. But if you run out of storage space on your system drive you can get yourself into the kind of mess that requires reinstalling.

In terms of both storage and RAM/CPU use, you will want to be extremely judicious of you application use. Firefox is a beast on any operating system.If you like to have a bunch of hungry tabs going on, you can’t really optimize the OS.

You should probably go for Linux Mint. I love the Gnome Desktop environment, but you’d need to install it afterwards. Probably go for the XFCE version of Linux mint.

Why do people recommend mint xfce over cinnamon? Is not the cinnamon version better for a newbie?

LMDE. And this is as someone who has used a ton of distro over the years and now just rolls that whenever asked. I prefer the Debian Edition; Mint feels hacky in comparison, almost like snaps and stuff have been ripped out to make the distro something it is not…

I was looking for similar answers and just couldn’t figure out what really mattered. Then I used this site: Distro Chooser

It asks a lot of questions, but I think they nailed the best choice for my needs and preferences.

What use cases are you planning for it? I mean, antiX would totally rock on that machine. However having Wayland, being lightweight and easy to maintain is kinda tough to find. Lose Wayland part, it’s antiX. Lose lightweight part, it’s Pop OS, openSUSE Leap, etc. Lose easy to maintain part (for a newbie), it’s Arch (mostly derivatives that come with a GUI installer).

Though if I was preparing that device for someone else, I would probably go with LMDE.

I personally recommend Mint, but ultimately others will have different opinions and you decide what you want.

Mint is often the most recommended distro, because whatever you may need to do in it, it tends to be easy-ish to figure out.

But these days I would strongly recommend in favor of some immutable distro like Bluefin/Aurora or Silverblue/kinoite. Instead of being easy to figure out how to do things on them, they make it so you won’t need to, ever.

It’s a complete paradigm shift and it might not be for everyone, but in the decades I’ve been using Linux for, I had never had such a smooth experience with any distro. Everything just works and you don’t need to think about the OS anymore.

However it won’t easily fit with some of the requirements you listed.

I am not sure that using Wayland is your best choice here. Based on laptop specs it is not like you are going to game on it. And for web and office tasks x11 still offers a better experience. On Wayland you would have problems with things like scaling, screen capturing etc. They are (to some extend) solvable, but are tricky to fix, especially with your lack of terminal experience.

Also I would not care that much for cutting-edge repositories. They are usually required for support of the new hardware (which of cause is not the case here).

Also, almost all modern DE are somewhat the same in terms of resource consumption. Some are a bit heavy (for example Cinnamon is heavier than xfce) but the difference if almost negligible. The majority of resources would be consumed by a browser, not DE. If you still wish to have the lightest DE possible, than you are limited to LXQT. XFCE nowadays is not as light as it used to be. You can have a very good performance with window managers like openbox and alike. For panel you can use polybar, tint or whatever. But that would require some configuration from you. Such setup is available in MX Linux. I suggest you to take a look at that distro, it is kinda good for old laptops. Of cause, standalone Wayland compositors (sway, hyprland, labwc, wayfire etc.) are very good, but they would require you to do a lot configuration work to set everything working. Even distros that ship them preinstalled (like Fedora Sway spin, for example) have somewhat broken defaults.

@thatonecoder unless i missed it, it looks like no one suggested puppy linux! it’s very light and some variants (bookworm pup) has wayland options (32 bit and xorg options as well) and full apt usage.