@ral-clan,
Good choice on Ubuntu type OS's, lubuntu is lighter because it is basically made to work on old laptops, computers, and some of today's tablets. I tried this a couple of days ago, and it seems real nice. Uses about 512 megs of memory (if I remember right) so you don't need a massive amount of memory, and very light on graphics usage.
You won't get all that much eye candy, or desktop mods, but can be downloaded and used, and yes you can use Ubuntu programs on it, as long as your machine has the space memory etc.
But, like all things, the more you add the more machine resources it needs. By light weight Linux means something you can put on an old machine, like my Toshiba laptop, with 512 megs of memory, and a 10 gig hard drive. (and to think an Amiga 4000 uses only a 1.2 gig HD and 18 meg of memory, original one guys not your souped up do everything Amiga's today my A4000 came with 10 meg hd thats right 20 meg, not gig).
Anyhow if you get a chance try Zorin OS 8, Premium, if you get the Ultimate you will have to pay money because of more packages installed. It is at
http://www.zorin.com.
I like it over ubuntu, because it has wine, playonlinux, and wine tricks, so I can play my Windows games (look at the listing provided for programs that work). I like the look (mine is windows 7) and the feel, I am using the 64 bit version, but had a hard time installing Far Cry 2, it kept giving me a IBE64.exe error, which I believe is caused by not being a 64 bit game, need to look it up. I know I had problems with Far Cry 2 with my 64 bit Windows XP os. Which I removed and went back to Windows XP 32 bit OS because of multiple problems.
Hope this helped, my top three choice right now are Zorin, Ubuntu, and then Lubuntu with PinguyOS, and Majora bringing up the rear. Really my first and favorite OS is Amiga OS 3.9, but oh well, my last favorite OS is Windows, although I do like Windows 8.1 installed on my 2nd place PC computer, with Windows 7 holding first, but Windows 7 is so sluggish, compared to Windows 8, that I am thinking of going to Windows 8.1 on all my game machines, but refuse to do so as of yet, because MS just has to much control of your computer (can you say NSA). Mac's and especially PC's have given in to NSA, and over 100,000 computers have shipped with rf wave activated devices on them which can be turned on or off by the NSA for spy purposes.
America Land of the Free, but only if you can pay your taxes. Spent 20 years in the Military only to run into this obamaination.
By the way when Linux maker Torvedous was asked by the NSA for a back door into their OS, his reply was there are so many different distro's and people doing stuff it would probably be good for only a couple of days and that he could think of no way to back door Linux.
smerf