Explaining Computers did a video about running various Linuxes on various low performance machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJGf8zVt3MI

As someone who is running a ancient compaq laptop, with 4gb of ram, Debian 13, I can say that it works just fine. Cant do gaming etc with it, but all I do with this is use the browser, IRC and watch a racing stream every weekend. Works perfectly fine with those.