I’ve done quite a bit of severe distro-hopping to find a reasonable distro to use on an old Dell XPS M1330, which is my work laptop at the moment. I eventually figured out that I would like something light-weight but also easy to use and easy to customize. I have several machines on my desk at work and only really use the laptop for a quick SSH session to a server during meetings and for testing LAMP stuff. I eventually settled on using CrunchBang 10 Statler, aptly described as a ‘Nimble Openbox Linux Distro’, which uses the stable 2.6.32 Linux kernel.
CrunchBang uses Openbox, the clean, fast and very configurable window manager, and Tint2 for the taskbar/system panel.