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.
That’s not a potato, that’s a fossil.
Arch with LXQT, maybe? Then you can choose to install specifically what you want with minimal overhead. Another option is the minimal version of NixOS, but like Arch, you’d need to install a DE separately, and you’d need to learn how to use Nix.
But if it’s still struggling, might be best as an art piece or command line only, given that a Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 can be had for <$100 and neither struggles with lighter DEs or browsers.