@Lori_Noctis to be quite honest, a ram upgrade before anything else. Besides that, unless you go (somewhat) DIY you are not going to see much difference with that bottleneck. 8g is the point that I feel like I am not missing anything.
As long as you go for "normal" and light distros there really isn't that much of a difference for most people. It's all fine. I would avoid niche ones like "gamer" distros because those are more pet projects than anything else. I'm a fan of RHEL adjacent ones like CentOS Stream (or Rocky Linux if you don't mind not getting updates frequently). Debian is also always a solid choice.

@Lori_Noctis the extra ram would let you get another 5 years out of it I'm guessing, if you wanted to. What's it about Mint you are unhappy with? I've used a lot of different flavours of Linux, and BSDs. I also use Linux professionally on a constant daily basis. Including my hobbies, counting close to 20 years with the penguin so ask away

@Huubje well, i just dont like the Look and feel of it. It always bordered me a bit. I dont know how oftenj i tried to change the desktops and look from what Mint is giving me...but none of them feels fully right for me, maybe i am a bit "special" but yes, thats the most what borders me..the look and feel

CC: @[email protected]
@[email protected] you may get exhausted using touchpad on old laptop or mouse especially when using xfce, try smthing new tile windows managers, i3wm easy to install, dwm minimalist written in C lang smooth running even with 4G RAM, cwm/fvwm if you get use to use mouse lot, instead of Mint Linux which is comes with another useless pkgs try Archlinux where you install what you need or VoidLinux/Gentoo, if you think they are hard to install, OpenBSD Unix-like system, very minimal, runs perfect on old ThinkPads, we're glad to help you;)

@voidq @Lori_Noctis "easy install" is quite generous. As fun as they are, these are not easy options. Everything you have mentioned is for enthusiasts. DWM for example requires you to recompile it every time you want to change a setting. BSDs are whole different cans of worms that come with whole different expectations because they aren't Linux at all. Arch Linux is cool, but will always require babysitting. Void comes with lots of edge cases because they deviate in lots of ways and Gentoo is great if you know what you are doing.
We need to ease people into options like this, because when we suggest people options like these we won't be there to troubleshoot them. There is a reason Linux Mint is advised to people before things like this.

CC: @[email protected]
@[email protected] If you want you can, installing OpenBSD is lot easy than Gentoo/Archlinux but after of course you need to read handbook/wiki/guides/youtubetutors, the most thing you shouldn't give up on process I tried many disdros and on many of them I stuck when I first saw OpenBSD I got confused there wasn't apt/pacman/xbps even #sudo wasn't there it was #doas and pkg_add not systemctl it was rcctl and many other. But what i did to learn these I just tried, no one stand by me and teach what to do I just asked around in #irc community, wiki pages, youtube guides, it became my new hobbie, day by day, now I'm running my own OpenBSD vps I got my own #got server it is minimalist alternative of #git version focused on security by default, I got my own email server, even this account runs inside of it, Whole message I want to deliver to you is keep trying, you don't need motivation to achieve you just need to want it, Do you ever notice ants? How they act when they cannot reach on top of smthing they trying another way until they reach on top they just keep trying. If you stuck somewhere reach to us, we're together anytime glad to help you.