I have an odd recommendation. Install puppy Linux on it. Years ago, it was my default choice for older machines like this. It runs completely on RAM, has extremely small footprint, extremely snappy and very featureful. I think over the years, the development has stagnated. However, you should be able to get a few years old ISO, copy it to a USB stick and you are good to go. The ISOs are usually in the range of 100-150 MB. Even if your laptop has just 1-4 GB of RAM, this will fly. Oh, by the way, it has most (types of) applications out of the box. It has native support for older hardware.

arch or fedora if it’s x86-64

How much have you used linux before/what is your goal?

antiX would be a good choice for that machine.

Objectives of learning and fun?

You do not state noobliness, ease of setup or time to install, number of failures/retries or anything like that.

**EDIT: you did state noobliness later on in comments so . . . i’d go stock debian +lxqt. ****

or all that I’d recommend arch. Do not use archinstall script , that reduces both learning and fun. Resource? follow the archwiki and go through lots of linked pages at each step. If you do wuss out and install stock debian (+lxqt)

maybe partition off a spare 10-20GB so you can play around with an arch install after you realise how boring and uneducational the others are (joke)

I’m pretty sure antiX is designed for this specific use, but I have not run it personally. It’s based in Debian stable (which right now is Bookworm and will be Trixie pretty soon). I’m very fond of Debian. It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done.

Do you know the specs of this laptop off hand? 2007 would place it in sort of a grey area between 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. If it is 32-bit, you are likely going to have major issues and I would recommend using something else.

Even if it is a 64-bit CPU, the performance may not be amazing, and running modern browsers with anything less than, say, 4GB RAM could be an issue.

I would recommend something lightweight, such as Linux Mint with the XFCE Desktop Environment. You may need to get even more aggressive about finding something lightweight for something that old, though.

If you’re not afraid to dive straight into minimalism/command line, void linux could be a good choice, especially if the laptop is 32bit because void still has 32bit repos.

Maybe https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

I have an Asus Eee PC from 2009 running Puppy Linux (as a secondary device).
As already pointed out you will need a leightweight distro and desktop environment.

https://distrochooser.de/ (available in English) can help you find the right distro, it takes into account the age of your device, your Linux knowledge, use case and a lot more.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used 2007 class laptops. In my mind I’d lean towards like Lubuntu or Xubuntu. LXQT or Xfce. It won’t look as modern as GNOME, KDE, Cosmic but they’re good

Is it 32bit or 64bit?
If it’s 64bit, with at least 4GB of RAM and an SSD, you can pick whatever you want.
I’m a fan of Linux Mint Debian Edition for beginners.
If it’s 32bit, MX Linux is probably your best bet.

Get a high capacity usb drive. Load ventoy and copy over all the linux distro you wish to try. There is no best distro, its all user preference.

For beginner, you can try linux mint, ubuntu, fedora etc

That is a too old of a laptop. In reality, modern Linux distros run well in anything newer than 10-15 years. Yes, there are distros that you can install into it, but they won’t be the latest and greatest distros of today. They’d be instead distros made specifically for old computers, and these distros are usually more complex because they lack all the gui tools found on newer distros.

First you need to find out if your CPU is 32bit or 64 bit, and if it can take a minimum of 2 GB of RAM (if yes, upgrade it too). Then, I’d suggest you download the right file from here: https://www.q4os.org/downloads1.html I find Q4OS to be the best for old computers (more gui tools), but you’d need that minimum of 2 GB of ram to load a browser and be comfortable with 3-5 tabs (no more than that though or you’ll hit the swap). Also, consider Falkon or Chromium as a browser, they use less ram than firefox (people have downvoted me for saying that in the past, but it’s my experience).

Personally, I’d get a used laptop for $150 from the last 10 years, and install Linux on that. It should be way faster than your Asus laptop. Just make sure it has 8 GB of RAM to be comfortable with modern Linux distros (Linux Mint can work adequately with 4 GB of RAM, unless you want to do video editing).

That is the eternal question but no distro is best. The most commonly suggested ones are Linux Mint and Pop OS. I will recommend Bazzite and say to avoid Arch or Arch-based distros.