I have a very, very old laptop with me. I don’t know the exact specs, but it has a single core celeron processor and 4GB of RAM. It’s an old little thing, maybe 15 years old.
I installed Debian on it with LXQT and it was chugging hard. I don’t expect it will run modern browsers anyways, so give me your best distros that can run on a potato and have a GUI.
Debian can still work, but you’d have better chances with legacy LXDE, or starting with no DE and installing IceWM.
Q4OS Trinity, antiX, and Damn Small Linux are all Debian derivatives known for being able to run on very old systems, and they’re among the most lightweight distros I know that are still functional for most purposes.