Try xfce or mate as a desktop environment. Both should be performant. Didn’t have luck with cinnamon DE, and it lagged/crashed even with great hardware.
I have a 2008 Medion Akoya MD 96850. I replaced the HDD with an SSD a few years ago and put Linux Mint on it. Before that, it took seven minutes to boot, but now it’s down to 1 minute 30 seconds. The battery is still okay, and you can run LibreOffice and Firefox at the same time (but no more than that, and only if you don’t do more than a duckduckgo search). It served me well for many years, but last year, I got a used Thinkpad T480 because the Medion was getting a bit too heavy to carry around.
Tell me more about your barely functioning laptops. Fringe operating systems welcome!
2015 Macbook pro, PoP!_OS, Fry an egg on the outer shell if you ask it to do 2 things at once.
Four-year-old MS Surface Go, they dont build shit to last anymore. I’ll see if I can get Linux Mint or some such if it gets much worse.
Try xfce or mate as a desktop environment. Both should be performant. Didn’t have luck with cinnamon DE, and it lagged/crashed even with great hardware.
I have a 2008 Medion Akoya MD 96850. I replaced the HDD with an SSD a few years ago and put Linux Mint on it. Before that, it took seven minutes to boot, but now it’s down to 1 minute 30 seconds. The battery is still okay, and you can run LibreOffice and Firefox at the same time (but no more than that, and only if you don’t do more than a duckduckgo search). It served me well for many years, but last year, I got a used Thinkpad T480 because the Medion was getting a bit too heavy to carry around.