Idk your laptop’s specs but I’ve been running Arch with XFCE on my Thinkpad T400 for a while now and it was decent enough to do college assignments, take notes, watch videos and stuff like that a year or two ago. Debian is also decent nowadays, and heard good things about Peppermint but I have no experience with it.
Truth is, it doesn’t really matter as long as you use a lightweight DE like XFCE, lxqt or cinamon. The thing that will inevitably kill older machines is the modern JS heavy web. Youtube and Reddit were really pushing the limits of that old machine sometimes but it struggled through.