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Right now that laptop is just being used to download stuff and on occasion I connect it to my TV to play a video, but it's really not often I do that. I'd still download stuff and then play around with basic everyday stuff on it to make sure I'm happy with it since that's mostly what I do on my main.
End game would be to switch my main to Linux if I like it. Beyond basic, everyday stuff that most people do, I edit videos on my main. That's about it.
What do you mean by download "stuff"? Like games? Books? Torrents? This is Lemmy, there is no need to hide :P
For external video, specifically, I'd avoid any distro that's too 'old' and use a popular DE (KDE, LXQt, maybe Cosmic?) so that it works seamlessly, especially if the laptop's output is hardwired to the internal graphics. Weird distros, or ones that use old stuff, may not 'just work'
Mint, for instance, is suggested a lot, and it would probably be fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if some graphics related thing doesn't work because something's too old.
And if you're gaming (for example), that's a whole different set of recommendations.
Oh, I didn't mean to be mysterious with shit, lol. Just basic torrents of TV shows and movies, haha. (Never went the streaming route, kept sailing the high seas.) I might download a book once in a while, but that's actually on my main.
I use VLC and Media Player Classic as my main video players on Windows, so VLC should be ok and if it isn't I'm sure I can find something else (I know MPC is Windows only).
I only do mobile games, not PC games, so not a concern for me there.
MPV is the golden standard on Linux (and windows) TBH. There’s also some stuff to do to try and get picture quality and HDR looking better, if you’re interested.
But yeah, if you aren’t gaming you don’t have to worry too much about distro choice.