I'm going to replace my host os on my shitty laptop with Linux specifically puppy Linux or alpine Linux from scratch and I need to know how will I get started and make it easier for myself, I use a HP notebook 540
Heck ya to Fedora, glad to see it recommended for a first time user. It's not much more difficult than Mint, but you can also get into the weeds instead of having to find a new distro after Mint. Mint basically has permanent training wheels, while with Fedora you can pop em off whenever it's convient.
Edit: Fedora is also a more up to date Alpine and it's not directly controlled by Red Hat.
No not really. Gnome for me is about 2.5 gigs of Ram, XFCE 700 megabytes and the CPU load also is way lower. XFCE can be heavy or light depending on how you configure it