I second the vote for Salix, I love it! , I would love to run chromeos on my netbook, but alas even the lime build of hexxeh doesn't like my hardware.

I have a question! What Linux distribution to install on a laptop that I use for work? By profession I am an economist, and laptop is Toshiba Satellite L500 with 3GB RAM memory and processor dual-core 2.0 GHz? Sorry for my bad English .. thanks

Welcome to the forums! Here's a great comparison of the Top 10:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

And here's a fun quiz to help you decide:

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

I think you can run whatever distro u like (just not ubuntu).. I recommend you try some tiling windows manager. fedora kde is fine, just install for example i3wm and try it out. it will run much smoother.

Debian based, lightweight, fast =>

http://crunchbang.org/about/

EDIT:

Sorry, I don't think I can delete this post, but was posted in wrong thread and is not on topic.