Which Linux operating system would work best for a 2012 Gateway ma7 laptop

I want to boot from a flash drive USB stick; how much memory should the flash drive memory stick be 16GB or 32GB or more.

Or should I re partition the hard drive and install it on the hard drive and boot it from there?

I would rather setup bios to boot from the flash drive, memory stick.

Is it possible just to boot it from the flash drive,memory stick, and bypass the hard drive?

Thank you very much and I greatly appreciate it and will be looking forward to your help with this matter.

If you go into the BIOS, you can likely set it to boot from USB first before internal disk.

Any pendrive greater than 8GB should work OK, depends on how much storage space you will want on it.

However, it is likely to be quite slow running from a pendrive, over USB2.

It would be wise to install it to the hard drive, as it would work faster.

Distros to look at would be the lightweight ones, preferrably using a Window Manager rather than a complete Desktop Environment.

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With a Celeron processor, you haven't got the most powerful of computers but, as the manufacturer says, it's adequate for everyday tasks and can even run Windows 10 (just!) On that basis, any Linux will do. You might not need a lightweight distro with a simple window-manager, but it really depends on whether you have the basic 1GB RAM or whether you've upgraded to 2 GB. Try Linux Lite, which should work even in 1 GB. If the worst comes to the worst, try antiX — it's pretty basic, but will work in 256 MB!

Running from USB is going to be slow, so I'd recommend installing.

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