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Depends on where you live and where your computer is located. If you have to heat your home during the winter months, and your computer is located in a room that you use frequently, you can leave it turned on without a bad conscience during that time. The vast majority of the energy consumption is dissipated as heat, so it will contribute to your heating. I work from home and I do feel the difference in my office when the computers are turned on.

This is the same kind of argument that is often forgotten when discussing the energy savings of fluorescent light bulbs vs incandescent ones, ignoring the fact that for many people during the colder months, they used to provide heat in addition to light. Heat that will have to be compensated for by regular heating. Overall, there will likely be a net gain in energy efficiency, but it will be less than expected.

During the summer months, especially if you have to actively cool your home, the exact opposite is true so turn it off as often as possible.

I’ve done exactly what you are trying to do. I am a somewhat experienced Linux user, though, and still it challenged me a lot. My best advice is to start getting your feet wet with Linux using a regular desktop computer first before attempting an installation on a thin client. If you have to do it though, here are some of the challenges waiting for you:

– 512MB of RAM (and no swap partition, see below) and an 800 MHz processor make for a truly sluggish experience with default modern window managers in popular distributions such as KDE or GNOME. You’ll want something more lightweight such as XFCE but then the environment won’t be quite as “friendly” (when coming from a Windows background). I.e. you will still need the command line and not everything will be as readily available as you might expect.

– For the same reason, Firefox 3.x won’t run smoothly either (it runs slower under Linux, don’t really know why). There are more lightweight alternatives such as Seamonkey that however are often not included by default.

– 512 MB compact flash are too tight, too, to install distributions such as Ubuntu. Probably need to upgrade to a fast 2 GB CF card.

– Compact flash memory will wear out quickly (and be too slow) with a journaled file system such as ext3 that most distributions use by default. Use ext2 instead. Also, the use of a swap partition on a flash drive is not recommended. This requires custom partitioning during install (in the advanced section) to create just one big ext2 partition that contains everything.

– No optical drive means you’ll need to install from a USB stick. Most distributions nowadays support this, alas, not all USB sticks can be booted from, and the BIOS in the thin client needs to support this properly, too. Ditto for using an external USB optical drive. YMMV.

Sorry, your question was which distribution to use, but as you can see the challenge goes beyond this. In my case, I used Debian because it scales down better than Ubuntu but still has a huge repository of readily-available software and I know Debian well. But definitely check out some of the other valuable suggestions in the other posts.

HTH,
Chris