Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
With hardware like that I'd recommend Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint (MATE edition), Crunchbang or some other distribution using a lightweight desktop environment. If you want to try out arch without the barebones approach to get your feet wet with Pacman/systemd; use Manjaro.
Yeah MS marketing is pretty horrible. I still facepalm at that dance/robot/popping commercial, and constant clicking of that damn kickstand. It's all really ass-backwards.
I think you're discrediting Ubuntu/Canonical and being harsh way too much. They've done a lot for the Linux ecosystem on the desktop. Whether one agrees with their desktop environment or not, we need a commercialized entity. I'm not a fan of Unity (I despise docks because I love textual cues...