I agree 110% with everyone that is mentioning your DE is going to be an important choice. I run Tumbleweed, and moved from KDE (which I love for its customization and effects) to Enlightment, and I've seen the load (measure of how busy my system is) go from an average of 8 or 9, down to 2 or 3. Any distribution can be configured to be using minimal resources if you spend the time, if you want minimal out of the box, there are many that have that option too, but your DE is going to affect your performance a lot more than any minimally setup OS. That being said, Chrome and having lots of tabs open is going to kill your memory usage...
I agree 110% with everyone that is mentioning your DE is going to be an important choice. I run Tumbleweed, and moved from KDE (which I love for its customization and effects) to Enlightment, and I've seen the load (measure of how busy my system is) go from an average of 8 or 9, down to 2 or 3. Any distribution can be configured to be using minimal resources if you spend the time, if you want minimal out of the box, there are many that have that option too, but your DE is going to affect your performance a lot more than any minimally setup OS. That being said, Chrome and having lots of tabs open is going to kill your memory usage...