I recently chose to setup my old Thinkpad X41t with something fairly similar: -- antiX 13 "base" with the Debian "stable" source list:

I recently chose to setup my old Thinkpad X41t with something fairly similar: -- antiX 13 "base" with the Debian "stable" source list: http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page -- I3-WM as the window manager. Needs to be installed separately. http://i3wm.org/ http://i3wm.org/ -- Conkeror as the keyboard-driven browser: http://conkeror.org/FrontPage http://conkeror.org/FrontPage The reason for using antiX/Debian rather than Arch is that I have no need to live on the bleeding edge. Once I've set things up I don't want them to break. I3 is at least as good -- probably better -- than ratpoison that I used to use earlier. The ability to quickly switch between "stacked", tabbed and full screen windows works great. Whether Conkeror is superior to Firefox with Pentadactyl I'm not yet sure of -- subjectively everything seems to load faster, but you do need to do some extra customization if you are going with Conkeror. Of course, that is also one of its selling points.