I might consider moving over to Fedora in the future, getting quite tired of Mint; however, I still recommend it to several folks who want a far easier to use distro than any of the other options.
If you check out DistroWatch, you can search for what distro suits your needs. The search function has extra options like the base, architecture, what size the image is (i.e., you want a system that is lightweight).
@K3Nv3, Yup, I was thinking of that because the super slims cannot have custom firmware installed, you can only do PS3HEN which is like a soft-mod of sorts but not permanent.
@BigOnYa, 1TB SSDs don't cost all that much nowadays, you should be good to go with one. Nothing too abysmal like 16TB as you're going to be using a small portion of that.