The show stopper here indeed are "modern" websites and electron apps, which telegram is iirc. They eat up all your ram quickly, and are are CPU hog, no matter how light weight the rest of your OS is. Linux doesn't magically make your hardware faster than it is.

But in other more traditional use cases, lubuntu can make quite a difference to Windows 10.

I think with older hardware you have to be quite careful about how stuff is drawn to the screen. For example if the distro comes with a display compositor enabled by default, you might want to disable it or see if there is a faster alternative. You might want to avoid watching videos in the browser where it has to composit the video with everything else on the page in a relatively inefficient manner, and instead stick to watching videos with something like mpv where it can draw straight to the screen, and make sure to configure it with whichever video output seems to be fastest on your hardware, etc etc.

Debian Stable runs quite a bit lighter than any Ubuntu derivative in my experience. Though you do need a minimum of 1GB RAM plus swap space for web browsing workloads, so the original Asus 700 netbooks would not be useful.

Same here, I've installed fedora on 3 different laptops which were previously running w7 and for each of them everything was too slow for any real usage

GNOME? Wayland?

Try Antix.

Sounds dedicated for this purpose, might give it a try :) thanks.

You are welcome.

Have you tried different clients? I like Links on my old 2011 netbook. Falkon even let me watch YouTube videos with good framerates, which I didn't expect.

http://links.twibright.com/

https://www.falkon.org/

As another user pointed out, Debian is a bit lighter than Ubuntu. Also you could try out Alpine Linux which is even lighter without renouncing to the usual desktop, office apps, firefox etc. https://alpinelinux.org/about/

I installed Ubuntu Mate on a laptop with Core 2 Duo T2330 and 2GB of RAM. I swapped out the HD for an SSD and later added an extra 1GB of RAM.

My son used it a lot for his online classes with Microsoft Teams.

wow, teams surprises me. In a browser or with the native client?

With the native client.

If you don't start anything else, you need less than 1GB of RAM.

I use mine as a controller for my 3D printer (But anything powerful enough to send text through usb would do). The screen resolution make some software a real pain to use.

I tried bunsenlabs and antix now and can't see this working out :/

- without load the computer gets quite hot. I can smell hot (not burning) plastic; ACPI(?) claims 70c and the fan exit is slightly hot to the touch. Just doesn't feel good.

And fixable problems:

- On both I had to fix wifi first (EU bands where not included)

- on antix firefox crashes

- couldn't make wifi connect on bunsenlabs

I like Zoris OS for low specced machines that I just want to install something and move on with life.

Edit: If you're fine with more manual work, Alpine/Void with sway is also fun.

Do you mean Zorin OS?

I do indeed. Thanks for the fix.

I've had success with Ubuntu, Arch, and Neverware on my old plastic Macbooks. All of them were pretty easy to install and I have no major when complaints using them