Best Unix for a shitty laptop

Not that bad in terms of specs - but most distros (FreeBSD, ReactOS, Gentoo) don't agree with my hardware.
What a Unix OS that's small enough to learn about operating systems while still being likely to work with my shitty laptop?

Currently running NetBSD.
Having trouble, though - my wireless drivers aren't building because the makefile invokes make -C, which NetBSD's default make doesn't seem to be happy with. I've tried replacing it with both options in NetBSD's make that take a directory as -C does to no avail, and now I'm trying to figure out how to unzip this .tgz to build CMake. Gunzip won't take .tgz files.