Linux distro for Celeron N2940 CPU

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to snatch a Thinkpad 11e laptop on sale. Its a good little machine with 8GB DDR3 Ram and 128GB SSD. The only downside is the CPU which is a Celeron N2940 (Quad Core @ 1.83GHz), but for $185 I can't complain.

I've been running the Win 10 pre-installed OS but I feel that I could get some more performance running Linux.
Its actually quite fast in Win 10 but Chrome a lot of times feels very sluggish. Don't know if that is a Chrome problem or the system is bogged down by the OS.

I would like to have the system dual boot since I kind of like Win 10 (my first time trying it) and would like to play a bit more with it. My problem is that I've never dual booted Linux on a UEFI system before.

My main system runs Arch and Windows is installed on a separate drive.
I don't want to screw up the recovery partitions that Lenovo has built in the laptop and would like to have the option to restore if anything goes wrong or the battery life under Linux is not up to par with Windows.

So I have some questions:
1) Can I use Clonezilla to image the drive as is now (recovery partitions & all) and restore it to is current state if I mess up during the Linux installation (EFI or any other thing I might screw up)?

2) What Linux distro would you suggest for a system with that CPU (basically the system's bottleneck)? I was thinking Arch with Openbox or Linux Mint with Mate but I am open to suggestions.

3) Finally will Chrome be less sluggish under a lightweight Linux distro or is Chrome the same resource hog anywhere you install it? What browser would you recommend?

Thank you!!!

Partitioning a GPT system is similar to an MBR one, the only difference is that for the GPT you need an additional ef00 partition of a couple of MBs at the very beginning of the partition order.
Preparing win10 for dual booting requires some additional steps tho, someone can throw some comments on that as the last win i've used is 7.

It should, it creates a mirror image of the original drive, ignoring free space.
unlike dd, which creates an identical copy but it copies every last bit.
If I had the space to spare on another drive i'd personally use dd.

Doesnt really matter, even heavy DEs should work smoothly. I'm still rocking a x200s with a 2.13 GHz dual-core and both arch & fedora run gnome smoothly, except that on full load animations stutter a tad.

Chrome should work perfectly on your system, maybe win10 is just hoging all the resources for itself idk. Again, my 2GHz dual-core + 6 GBs of ddr2 handles a virtual machine, web browsing (chromium) and text editing simultaneously perfectly fine, with full disk encryption requiring a tad extra processing.

Hmm, the Celeron N2940 is a Bay Trail CPU (Atom) with a TDP of max 7.5 Watts. I tried finding some info in the Laptop, but as per usual laptop makers are kinda terrible at providing interesting info. Looks like the 11e has single channel RAM? That would hamper it a fair bit, could make RAM heavy stuff like Chrome stutter a bit.
If it has dual channel RAM there shouldn't really be a problem running stuff like Chrome. Sure it's not a desktop CPU, but for a light laptop it should be more than ok.

Its single channel RAM. So maybe you are right. That may well be the problem with Chrome. Haven't tried any other RAM heavy applications.

Maybe I will give firefox a try again after all these years. :-)

I think it should still "work" with apps like chrome, a little stutter now and then, but mostly work even with single channel. You could try the mem benchmark in say AIDA64 or something.