My PC with 4GB of RAM and an HDD is barely holding with linux mint. Tbf Mint isn’t the problem, it only takes 32% of ram compared to the 60+% of a debloated windows 10. It’s the other apps. Running a browser along anything else and Linux mint starts to struggle, even the built-in apps like the file manager and the text editor feel like they’re gonna crash the computer at any moment because of the random freezing/ delays.
My advice would be to try upgrading to 4GB and installing an SSD. Your old computer will likely only support SATA SSDs, which have a max speed of 500MB/s, but it’s far better than the 30MB/s at best that the HDD disks give.
If you guys like hiking and stuff, there’s this cool open source app called trail sense on f-droid and it’s just so much feature packed…
I don’t hike, so I only use it for it’s pedometer capabilities and a hypothetical situation where “I might get really lost” but the amount of features it has for hiking and survival is crazy and so I think deserves to be more known.