I have a very, very old laptop with me. I don’t know the exact specs, but it has a single core celeron processor and 4GB of RAM. It’s an old little thing, maybe 15 years old.
I installed Debian on it with LXQT and it was chugging hard. I don’t expect it will run modern browsers anyways, so give me your best distros that can run on a potato and have a GUI.
Q4os with Trinity desktop really needs little RAM and runs fast even on old devices. The desktop is a bit old-fashioned, but ok. You may also try lighter browsers, perhaps Palemoon.
But 4GB is actually not that little, almost all distros can run well with it, especially rather slim ones like Debian lxqt. maybe it’s really due to the hdd.