It depends on the level of paranoia, when I go to conferences I bring my laptop with a special Linux, to give you an idea (old asus eeepc)
I remember the EEE PC, they were quite slow, but small. And thick to current laptop standards. What's "special" about that Linux distro? I now have what I call my "disposable laptop" for travel: fully encrypted, old, rugged, nice keyboard, many hours of battery life left, and cheap enough not to worry about it. But it runs a "normal" Linux.