You spoke of 2 distros of Linux, and both of those distros are not mainstream user distros. Fedora is literally Red Hat’s development platform and is one of the most rapidly changing distribution of Linux. It is NOT recommended for home users unless you are RHCE material.
I admit I’m not intimately familiar with Lubuntu, but I will tell you that you neglected to mention Linux Mint which is one of the most user-friendly distros of Linux with which I’ve ever had the pleasure of working.
I would NEVER recommend Fedora to a neophyte home user. For his purposes, Mint is the way to go, and you mentioned Windows 8 without noting that OP’s computer only has 684 MB of RAM. Windows 8 will NOT run on his machine, period.
Of course it is, it in the top ten here: "Fedora is perfect for many mainstream desktop/laptop users. Fedora handles graphics well and uses appealing interfaces. The recommended system requirements are 1GB memory and 10GB hard-drive. -http://www.linux.org/threads/which-distro-is-right-for-me.4834/
And there is no unified voice in Linux (except hate for Windows), while what i recommended was Lubuntu.
I admit I’m not intimately familiar with Lubuntu, but I will tell you that you neglected to mention Linux Mint which is one of the most user-friendly distros of Linux with which I’ve ever had the pleasure of working.
Sure i would recommend Linux Mint, which has the top spot, and its universal installer comes without the proprietary media codecs that are illegal on Linux in the US; (http://www.neowin.net/news/watching-dvds-on-linux-is-mostly-illegal). Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora, Lubunto and OpenSuse also come without them by default.
But for a PC with little ram then he should go with a lighter variant of Ubuntu, which Libuntu is, though Xubuntu may be better.
you mentioned Windows 8 without noting that OP’s computer only has 684 MB of RAM.
True, though i also sent him to where he can get 2gb or ram cheap, while encouraging him to get a newer PC.
But he needs to know that this can take some time to learn (read the forums) and glitches in Linux on old PCs or laptops, in my experience.