What’s your favourite Linux distribution and why?

[TimeWoundsAllHeals]

Looking for something to put on a relatively old thinkpad for doing light programming in the evening in bed.
The laptop is a monster (size, weight and heat and fan noise) so I doubt I’ll use it for anything else (iDevices far better for casual browsing, video watching etc).

Debian 4 lyfe :) Although to be fair I would probably go for Mint or something a bit more civilised that straight out Debian. But I have a soft spot for Debian as it was my first Linux distro, back in the day when you compiled your own kernels. Ubuntu would probably just work, an

My first was fedora but I just gave up after download failed 3 times in a row (using up loads of my phone data since I tethered due to our landline internet being atrocious!)

I have experience with arch, gentoo (nope, no interest in baby sitting the os, just want to use it), fedora, Debian, elementary and Ubuntu.

When the frustration of burning nearly 6gb of data for nothing wears off I will probably just get Ubuntu but I’m open to other suggestions.