I'm using antix on a 23 year old laptop. Except for web browsing, it's quite snappy with an IDE SSD (is actually an nvme drive with ide adapter, which is such a waste of that drive, but it's 2230 and 128GB, so not very useful anywhere else)

Pretty much any desktop that offers lxqt during installation works pretty well in my experience. I ran tumbleweed with lxqt for a while on a 4 core atom with 4 GB ram and it was quite smooth.