If you want blazing fast on an old machine, I always keep a flash drive with some good old slitaz. Can’t beat that all in ram configuration on the slitaz minimal windowed version. But that’s not really the question here. If the cinnamon variant is slow, xfce.

Coming from someone who nuked their grandmas computer and installed ChromeOS Flex on it since she can’t screw that up too badly and just needs a Facebook/search machine.

Tho, now I am wishing for a ChromeOS Flex version that is just Firefox since adblock will be dying on chrome with manifest v3.

I was suggesting mint for cinnamon since it would be relatively familiar to anyone using windows, at least in form. Decently managed software store.

Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin OS Lite, Peppermint OS.