Tiny Core's main strength is its extreme customizability -- you don't have to download applications you don't need. That said, you will have to invest some time in learning which apps you DO need. I started using TC after being on Windows for several years, and rather belatedly realizing that 90% of my personal computing was web surfing, with some e-mail etc., so why was I on a $1500 box loaded with apps that I never used? When I tried TC I thought I could get by with just a web browser (e.g. Chrome or Firefox). Turned out I also needed Flash (e.g. for viewing YouTube), sound (OSS or Alsa), a PDF document viewer (I like to read really old archived books sometimes), and a few others. If you're coming from a (say) Windows environment and haven't had to install apps from scratch, it may not be immediately apparent what does what.
Hopefully once you get the above sorted out, you won't have to do much tinkering if you're on fairly modern hardware. Unfortunately I started with an old PC I happened to have sitting around, and although most things worked there were a couple of quirks that took me a while to figure out.
If you need something out of the box that generally works right away, may I suggest you look at Puppy Linux, which comes in various versions that offer different combinations of applications. I tried a couple of them before I came to TC. It wasn't really what I wanted so I moved on, but don't recall having any major problems with it.