Linux Mint 17 is the distro I use for web browsing and such.

My primary working machine, a Windows 8.1 laptop, crashed its hard drive recently. I replaced it with a twin of one of the data drives (yeah, my laptop has 3 internal hard drives), and rebuilt it from the restore discs. Oddly enough, I didn't wind up reinstalling all the garbage software. Well, except for McAfee bloatware.

A friend had a very old laptop that was suffering under Windows, and we installed Linux Mint on it and he enjoys using it again.

I haven't used Mint directly, but I've used Debian for years and now Ubuntu which Mint is based on. It's reasonably stable (a bit more cutting-edge than Ubuntu), and all three use the same package format so it's fairly easy to use Ubuntu packages on Mint and vice-versa (Debian uses older versions of libraries so it's a bit more of a pain to get dependencies installed putting a Debian package on Mint). I'd recommend the Cinnamon 64-bit version, it's Gnome 3 under the hood. With standard resolutions the Xfce edition's also good if you like an old-school window manager and panel instead of a full-on integrated desktop environment. All the different editions are basically the same underlying distribution with different default desktop environment packages installed. You can swap between them, and there's absolutely no problem running more than one available (eg. having Cinnamon and Xfce installed and available to select from at login at the same time). Don't worry about compatibility either, applications from the various desktops will run in the other desktop environments without too many problems (biggest one is that eg. Gnome 3 applications will use Gnome 3 settings and theme for their window decoration instead of Xfce even when running on the Xfce desktop).

If you want to go with the more widely-known Ubuntu, go with Ubuntu GNOME. Vanilla Ubuntu uses Unity, Canonical's in-house desktop thingy, which is being deprecated in favor of Gnome in 18.04.

It's light weight. You might have to install a few packages if you spend most of your time online playing Facebook games.