Just see if you can tolerate Debian and lxqt before you start doing weird stuff.

What kind of weird mutant laptop is this? You may have more and cheaper upgrade options available than you think…

E: I found a couple of laptops that ship with that processor and gpu and they all seem to have two ram slots and ship one stick of ram in the 8gb configuration. A ram upgrade in that case would be $30 or so. Even if you needed to swap two sticks it would only be $50 to go to 16gb and help you a lot.

The ones I saw all had an nvme slot and a sata port with an ssd installed in one of em. I have had great luck speeding up slow ssds with spinrite running its level 3. I’ll spare you the explanation but it really works.