I literally said in my previous comment that Windows 10/11 is unusable without an SSD. And then you present to me a system with an SSD that’s “pretty fast”. Ok.
You also detail how you rewire half the system’s internals to get it useable. That’s not what I’d call performant.
Just about every Linux distro is 100% ready to go in terms of performance. No tweaking to get things working at all. Only customization stuff, which is not what you were describing.
I setup a friend’s old system to Linux that was brutally slow with Windows. It’s a Core Duo (12+ year old CPU), 4GB RAM, and an HDD. She uses it every day for remote work. She says she’d never know it’s an old system if no one told her. That’s performance.