1/10 Do not recommend

Want to learn? Buy a current computer (secondhand to save money) that has a blazing fast CPU, shit loads of RAM, and any AMD graphics card. Running into trouble is no fun for beginners. You'll quickly feel depressed and lose interest.

For the learning part, follow any distro's official installation guide and do it step by step. Learn which part of the systems does what, and how to set it up, how to debug.

And stick to Ethernet connection before you get comfortable. (Shitty) Wi-fi ICs more often than not have driver issues.

For the old laptop, sell it for parts if you're not feeling nostalgic.

For the last time, buy a new computer, please.

slackware :)

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

antiX would be a good choice for that machine.

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

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.

I want to learn a Distro for fun.

Are you just using this laptop to dip your toes into Linux and see if you like it? I would recommend Debian + XFCE. It's lightweight, it prioritizes stability over new features, and it's a fairly easy UI for a newbie to understand. Alternatively Linux Mint MATE Edition might be worth a try. It's also lightweight but is a bit more "up to date" than Debian feature wise.

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

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.

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.

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

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/

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).

Sounds like you are new to linux? I always recommend newbies start out with Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Ubuntu has a good installer with scripts that detect hardware, particularly older or fringe (wifi, etc) hardware. Is it the best? Not in my opinion, but you want your laptop to work and educate yourself on linux in the beginning. Once you are a moderate to advance user, switch to Arch, it is the best imo.

Fedora for beginners. Ubuntu-based lost the crown because of Snap bullshit.

I'd say for a new user it doesn't really matter which distro you use as long as you find an environment you're comfortable using to get your feet wet. I would highly recommend going for KDE if you come from Windows since it has a similar appearance. Gnome for those coming from Apple. With regards to your question; if you want stability, go for Debian as a distro. Especially on an older laptop like that it will work fine. You could grab the ISO via the official site here (Click on the "Live KDE" link) : https://www.debian.org/CD/live/ If you do happen to go for KDE, use the Discover program to find new software to install. If you would like to have flatpak, or snap support this can also be installed via Discover. If I remember correctly there's also an appimage manager you could find via Discover, which will "install" all appimages to a specific folder so you can more easily find them there. Beyond the above it should be easy enough to get wise about Linux by using it. Even without installing you can use the liveimage for a while to get a feel for it, and I would definitely suggest looking around for what suits your tastes. Experiment to your heart's content; if you break something you can just reinstall it from a new live image.