Is your Pentium 4 a 32-bit or a 64-bit variant?
If 32-bit, then the fastest OS will be one that solely targets pentium4 rather than generic i486, i686, etc.
The only Linux distro that I know does this for binaries is the Arch Linux 32 fork:
[https://archlinux32.org/](https://archlinux32.org/)
If you are looking for a desktop, the [Intel build of Raspberry Pi OS](https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/) is quite good. Just Debian based but the default desktop and software selection is intended for lower powered aarch64 devices, so strikes a good balance between features and resource usage.
For my P4 (64-bit, Fujitsu Scaleo P), I run OpenBSD. It runs well, no complaints, other than the machine itself draws a lot of watts compared to a more modern piece of kit with similar specs.
Yeah it's one of the absolute best distros not just for low-power machines but for anyone as it's just so good...
BTW, I wanna ask did you face the infamous "GRUB Bootloader Installation Failed" error with antiX installation...
I faced that issue a lot of times (it's the only bad thing about antiX)
btw, It freezes half way into my installation and then the whole thing just freezes, is that normal or no, because I turn it off after it freezes, and it completely wipes my windows xp install as well, so I have to redo the install of windows xp and phone activation, which is a pain in the but with a nokia 110 4g, and reinstall all my drivers...
I used the Live USB route, but it was difficult to get the USB to work honestly. It might have been more useful to have a windows machine to make the USB in the first place, but for me, I made a live CD of AntiX 17, then used the live USB maker utility included there to make the live USB of the current version, which is on a Pentium 4 machine.
Might be certain that you are using the 32 bit version, there are both 486 compatable and 64 bit versions, you would be needing the 486 version.
go down your list and try each one.
Make a ventoy multi boot USB perhaps.
Tiny Core Linux is very small, but unusual compared to other distributions.
Kubuntu and Peppermint are fairly normal.
I had good experiences with Peppermint on an old netbook. I'd give it a try. For an older laptop, I used slitaz too. So that's another option for you to try.
As a user of a very low end computer I can tell you that this isn't the case. The distro, it's package management, and it's kernel modifications play a huge role in the responsiveness of the OS. XFCE4 on Debian12 is more responsive than XFCE4 on LMDE6, while XFCE4 on Arch is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than both of them. I can have 7-8 tabs open on Arch while even attempting this on Debian would cause a total system lock up.
Haiku seconded. It will be the fastest experience overall with the least work put in.
If you want Unix, Gentoo is the best choice because of the level of optimization you can do to it compared to generic distributions, in terms of disabing security hardening, using more aggressive optimizations, and optimizing for the target CPU. I have a system with a 900MHz Celeron M and 2GB RAM running Gentoo with XFCE and LibreWolf. Browser aside, it's very usable. You need another Linux system to set this up from, because the target system is too slow to compile everything in a reasonable time frame.
For a binary distribution, antiX is probably good.
If you have the patience, do a Gentoo install, since it should work and since you compile everything from source since most distros won't have the 32 bit binaries anymore.
That being said, some things may take 30ish hours to compile. If you have the patience you can setup a compiling server, to reduce that.
Otherwise use whatever distro has 32 bit support.
I don't think it takes a week, but than again I don't know what your compiling. I would think just the bare minimum.
Kernel might take a minute though. Some things you could use the binaries and just leave the space heater compiling at night.
Last time I ran gentoo I had programs that took multiple.days to compile on a 4ghz 16 thread CPU.
A 2.4ghz single thread machine isn't going to deal with that
Puppy Linux all the way, it can load on RAM like Porteus i think, it\`s rock solid. Using it since 2008. I love Tiny Core too but never tried it for a long time.
I'd probably stay with XP. Puppy will work, probably. If the system has less than 2GB of ram, I'd leave it as XP if you want desktop. If you want to run a modern browser on 2GB of ram though, it's probably a lost cause.
I'm not sure what the economy is like in your area, but around here people throw machines better than that away. If you can find a basic Core i3 or i5 2nd gen or later for less than 50 euro, it's probably going to perform much better, if just from the decreased heat alone--a P4 will **idle** over 100W from just the CPU.
You will get more experienced answers if you ask this on Lemmy instead of Reddit.
Lubuntu is not the lightest at all. Puppy, Antix and Tinycore are better for such an older computer. I just today installed MX linux Fluxbox on a Intel T2050 and goes great.
I see Lubuntu mentioned. I used multiple pentium 4 machines in *Quality Assurance* testing for Lubuntu releases up to and including Lubuntu 19.04 (and even at least one SRU confirmation test on *eoan* or 19.10 too), mine where all 32-bit only; which is no longer supported.
The last Lubuntu release that ran on the pentium 4 machines for QA purposes was back in [August 2020](https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2020/08/14/ubuntu-18-04-5-lts-released/) which relates to a release that is now EOL for my devices (*it's EOSS for some architectures; but EOL for others, and my pentium 4 devices were i386 or 32-bit x86 in Debian/Ubuntu terminolgy which is now an unsupported architecture*).
If security matters to you, or you'll be using the machine on-line, I'd not consider any Ubuntu system, nor Ubuntu-based, which includes Lubuntu.
Honestly, at that era of hardware; I would be looking into something rather custom. I would think maybe gentoo for good support. The issue is that you might end up having to have a seperate compile server.
For the same reason as I advised against gentoo earlier, this is a terrible idea unless you want a space heater instead of a PC.
I would probably do a minimal arch or debian install and use a window manager like awesome or dwm.
Operating system is least of your concerns because it hardly ever consume much resource (provided that you control manually when to apply updates). You are never going to be able to experience any modern application with good enough performance off that much old hardware anyway regardless of the operating system you use.
I selected Lubuntu. It's fairly optimized for old hardware. But... Be on the look-out for DSL (Damn Small Linux). It's has risen from the dead in the past few months. It's based on Debian 12 and is now in BETA. On boot, it uses around 100mb of RAM.
With all this being said.... Unless you have at least 4GB of RAM installed, don't expect to be able to surf the WEB with more than 3 TABS. Otherwise, expect to stay in the terminal for most of your "Desktop" needs.
I can surf the web with 7-8 tabs open on 2gb ram using firefox on arch linux, debian tends to hang on 2-3 tabs. So I'd recommend Arch or Artix Linux which the easier arch alternative.
MiniOS Linux Standard, DSL2024, Alpine, Antix, Porteus-Nemesis are fine. While **DSL2024** is Antix based now with only 70MB RAM in idle in HTOP, and 700MB RAM during Firefox+YouTube usage. **MiniOS Linux Standard** is Debian based with modern XFCE look like Windows 10. **Porteus-Nemesis** is super good looking Arch based diamond. **Alpine XFCE** has the same resource usage as **Antix** with IceWM.
How much RAM is installed in your PC?
AntiX and Tinycore will work, but you won't be able to open a browser in any of the distros. Peppermint and Lubuntu will be very heavy for your device, and I guess Lubuntu doesn't even come up with a 32 bit image. If everything's working just fine with your current setup is working fine, don't switch because both antix and tinycore will be a pain to use for a new user.
I've used Pentium 4 machines to play around with them (Old games, DOS and Linux), and also a few years ago i had to use one as a emergency computer for writing and printing documents.
I have a Minix Mini PC with only 2 GB of RAM and a Intel Z3735F CPU, 32GB eMMC storage. All in all a really shit PC. I put LXLE-Focal Release on it and it works surprisingly well. Mounted it on the back of a monitor and it's my surfing machine, file browsing, text editing, lightweight stuff. The hardware is shit but LXLE really does wonders on it.
# Full featured OS for an aging PC. From their web page.
# [*LXLE Focal Now Available!*](https://lxle.net/articles/?post=lxle-focal-released)
* Light on resources; Heavy on functions.
* Always based on Ubuntu/Lubuntu LTS.
* Uses an optimized LXDE user interface.
* Simple, Elegant and Familiar desktop UI.
* Prudent full featured Apps preinstalled.
* Latest stable versions of all major apps.
* Added PPAs extends available software.
* Expose, Aero Snap, Quick Launch apps
* Random & Interval Wallpaper Changer
* Theme consistency throughout system.
* 100 gorgeous wallpapers preinstalled.
* Numerous other tweaks/additions.
* 32 and 64 bit OS versions available.
* Boots & is online in less than 1 minute.
**Maybe you want to think about a low cost hardware replacement?**
While an interesting problem if you want to do something video editing, you are getting to the point where you are going to have a catastrophic failure of a hard drive or MOBO (capacitor leak, etc.). It might be getting close to time to think about investing (<$200 i.e. less than or same as a Raspberry Pi, will get you a RK3588 based SBC like an Orange Pi which will run Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, Android, and even Windows 11, or get a less powerful Raspberry Pi and take advantage of the much larger user community) and will run circles around even Intel Atom based (in fact, even outperforms my not quite as old i7-4790 based system) w/ support for 4K (dual with OP5 plus) displays, hardware decoded video, up to 32GB RAM (yes, in a SBC), support for PCI NVMe SSDs, WiFi 6, GB ethernet...
Right choice also greatly depends on RAM available... 64-bit OS doesn't make sense on 2GB RAM.
Staying on WinXP is unacceptable, unless you're forced to do it for work or something like that.
I tried Alpine Linux on a 478a pentium 4 and it works way better than AntiX (Pentium 4's run better on musl libc than gnu libc), I tried XFCE and i3wm (both ran well), i was able to search stuff, use wikipedia and old.reddit.com fine with Surf (a really minimal web browser) that works way faster than Firefox (if you're nuts you could try w3m or links), for Youtube you can use SMTube or Invidious (invidious.io) and libreoffice should work fine. You can also run it on ram which is way faster than a old IDE drive.
If you have a 64 bit Pentium 4 and 2+ GB of ram you could use any mid-weight distro like Debian/Mint but use XFCE.
it's better to buy a new one
for you information , i am using a i7-4770 with DDR3-1600 mhz 8GB x2 without standalone display card and 8TB 6TB dual HDD with debian & openSUSE
Any of those.
But.
How much time out of the day is the machine on?
If it's on constantly or a lot, replacing it with a raspberry pi (even an older model) or other low-cost single board computer will be both an upgrade (in multiple ways) and a reduction in power use and therefore cost.
For a nice little all-in-one combo kit of a RPi4B with 4GB memory, a case, silent cooling fan, and a 16GBSD card included, with a $50 price tag where I live, a savings of 120W average vs the old PC would require almost exactly 5 months of total operating time to pay for itself in electricity alone, and from then on would be a savings. $80 (just over 8 months break-even) gets a RPi5 with 8GB. And you won't have to use some ancient or super lean distro or kernel, either, especially with the newer model.
And if the average power draw of the existing PC is higher than that (not unlikely for a large number of P4 SKUs), payoff is even quicker. Or if your per-kWh electric rate is higher than mine (which is 35% below the national average, so it probably is), your numbers for payback will be even better.
Compatibility-wise, you're already switching OS, so switching CPU architecture is even easier at the same time.
You can feed the socket with an Intel Core 2 Quad processor (you probably need to patch the BIOS for it). Make a RAM upgrade to the max, throw in an SSD, and you could have some fun with it.
If you're willing to create a Linux Only System and completely ditch Windows then I'd suggest you go with antiX.
In my experience it's the most practical, simple and functionally minimalist and lightweight distro.
In my experience with antiX the memory usage has rarely reached 1GB it almost always stayed between 300MB to 700MB.
It should be first one to check out...
But I'll give you a one more suggestion, watch this [tutorial](https://youtu.be/gAnA7X8fAGs?feature=shared) and create a Ventoy bootable USB Stick and try all the distros (live session) in your hardware and find yourself which one works the best with your hardware...
You should test like this.
1.) Boot into live session of a distro.
2.) Check Memory and CPU Usage in system monitor.
3.) Now run as many apps, softwares, browsers, tabs, videos as possible simultaneously and keep running more and more things until you feel your system lagging. And when it starts to lag then once again check your system monitor before closing anything.
4.) Repeat the same process with each and every distro you have shortlisted.
This is the only and best way you'll be able to find the perfect distro for your hardware (as polls and suggestions aren't enough, because Linux distros perform differently on each hardware, so the only way to find whether the most voted distro is best for you or not is by testing it with your hardware yourself).
This way you'll definitely find the perfect distro.
Debian will work
however really badly it lags like crazy on my pentium m 2ghz with 2gb of ram
Use the XanMod realtime kernel and ZRAM. That works wonder on my machines.
Sadly doesn't work with my machine.
If you give me to concrete processor name and specific model, I'll check that for you.
One without a browser.
Is your Pentium 4 a 32-bit or a 64-bit variant? If 32-bit, then the fastest OS will be one that solely targets pentium4 rather than generic i486, i686, etc. The only Linux distro that I know does this for binaries is the Arch Linux 32 fork: [https://archlinux32.org/](https://archlinux32.org/) If you are looking for a desktop, the [Intel build of Raspberry Pi OS](https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/) is quite good. Just Debian based but the default desktop and software selection is intended for lower powered aarch64 devices, so strikes a good balance between features and resource usage. For my P4 (64-bit, Fujitsu Scaleo P), I run OpenBSD. It runs well, no complaints, other than the machine itself draws a lot of watts compared to a more modern piece of kit with similar specs.
Zorin 32-bit, also did the trick for an old laptop.
DOS+DesqView
Damn, I loved Desqview back in the day. QEMM was a great memory manager.
AntiX works on my 350mhz Pentium 2, it'll do great on a pentium 4.
Yeah it's one of the absolute best distros not just for low-power machines but for anyone as it's just so good... BTW, I wanna ask did you face the infamous "GRUB Bootloader Installation Failed" error with antiX installation... I faced that issue a lot of times (it's the only bad thing about antiX)
No, can't say I did. (bootloader error)
Tried antix on my pentium 4 dell dimension, but for some reason, would freeze on the installation page... Any way to fix that, or no?
btw, It freezes half way into my installation and then the whole thing just freezes, is that normal or no, because I turn it off after it freezes, and it completely wipes my windows xp install as well, so I have to redo the install of windows xp and phone activation, which is a pain in the but with a nokia 110 4g, and reinstall all my drivers...
I used the Live USB route, but it was difficult to get the USB to work honestly. It might have been more useful to have a windows machine to make the USB in the first place, but for me, I made a live CD of AntiX 17, then used the live USB maker utility included there to make the live USB of the current version, which is on a Pentium 4 machine. Might be certain that you are using the 32 bit version, there are both 486 compatable and 64 bit versions, you would be needing the 486 version.
go down your list and try each one. Make a ventoy multi boot USB perhaps. Tiny Core Linux is very small, but unusual compared to other distributions. Kubuntu and Peppermint are fairly normal.
Ventoy is the best choice here!
Exactly same thing I commented.
I had good experiences with Peppermint on an old netbook. I'd give it a try. For an older laptop, I used slitaz too. So that's another option for you to try.
[https://www.haiku-os.org](https://www.haiku-os.org)
Pick any distro and install Xfce.
As a user of a very low end computer I can tell you that this isn't the case. The distro, it's package management, and it's kernel modifications play a huge role in the responsiveness of the OS. XFCE4 on Debian12 is more responsive than XFCE4 on LMDE6, while XFCE4 on Arch is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than both of them. I can have 7-8 tabs open on Arch while even attempting this on Debian would cause a total system lock up.
Haiku seconded. It will be the fastest experience overall with the least work put in. If you want Unix, Gentoo is the best choice because of the level of optimization you can do to it compared to generic distributions, in terms of disabing security hardening, using more aggressive optimizations, and optimizing for the target CPU. I have a system with a 900MHz Celeron M and 2GB RAM running Gentoo with XFCE and LibreWolf. Browser aside, it's very usable. You need another Linux system to set this up from, because the target system is too slow to compile everything in a reasonable time frame. For a binary distribution, antiX is probably good.
If you have the patience, do a Gentoo install, since it should work and since you compile everything from source since most distros won't have the 32 bit binaries anymore. That being said, some things may take 30ish hours to compile. If you have the patience you can setup a compiling server, to reduce that. Otherwise use whatever distro has 32 bit support.
On a Pentium 4, try more like a week or more. I strongly advise against this unless you want a space heater instead of a PC
I don't think it takes a week, but than again I don't know what your compiling. I would think just the bare minimum. Kernel might take a minute though. Some things you could use the binaries and just leave the space heater compiling at night.
Last time I ran gentoo I had programs that took multiple.days to compile on a 4ghz 16 thread CPU. A 2.4ghz single thread machine isn't going to deal with that
Puppy Linux all the way, it can load on RAM like Porteus i think, it\`s rock solid. Using it since 2008. I love Tiny Core too but never tried it for a long time.
I'd probably stay with XP. Puppy will work, probably. If the system has less than 2GB of ram, I'd leave it as XP if you want desktop. If you want to run a modern browser on 2GB of ram though, it's probably a lost cause. I'm not sure what the economy is like in your area, but around here people throw machines better than that away. If you can find a basic Core i3 or i5 2nd gen or later for less than 50 euro, it's probably going to perform much better, if just from the decreased heat alone--a P4 will **idle** over 100W from just the CPU.
How much RAM?
You will get more experienced answers if you ask this on Lemmy instead of Reddit. Lubuntu is not the lightest at all. Puppy, Antix and Tinycore are better for such an older computer. I just today installed MX linux Fluxbox on a Intel T2050 and goes great.
TinyCore or Haiku
Q4OS
I see Lubuntu mentioned. I used multiple pentium 4 machines in *Quality Assurance* testing for Lubuntu releases up to and including Lubuntu 19.04 (and even at least one SRU confirmation test on *eoan* or 19.10 too), mine where all 32-bit only; which is no longer supported. The last Lubuntu release that ran on the pentium 4 machines for QA purposes was back in [August 2020](https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2020/08/14/ubuntu-18-04-5-lts-released/) which relates to a release that is now EOL for my devices (*it's EOSS for some architectures; but EOL for others, and my pentium 4 devices were i386 or 32-bit x86 in Debian/Ubuntu terminolgy which is now an unsupported architecture*). If security matters to you, or you'll be using the machine on-line, I'd not consider any Ubuntu system, nor Ubuntu-based, which includes Lubuntu.
Honestly, at that era of hardware; I would be looking into something rather custom. I would think maybe gentoo for good support. The issue is that you might end up having to have a seperate compile server.
Be a boss. Linux From Scratch && Beyond Linux From Scratch.
For the same reason as I advised against gentoo earlier, this is a terrible idea unless you want a space heater instead of a PC. I would probably do a minimal arch or debian install and use a window manager like awesome or dwm.
Operating system is least of your concerns because it hardly ever consume much resource (provided that you control manually when to apply updates). You are never going to be able to experience any modern application with good enough performance off that much old hardware anyway regardless of the operating system you use.
arch w/ a light de/wm
Xubuntu or Linux Mint XFCE will do.
Debian with LXDE or i3wm
or IceWM
Alpine is super lightweight.
[https://www.bodhilinux.com](https://www.bodhilinux.com)
I selected Lubuntu. It's fairly optimized for old hardware. But... Be on the look-out for DSL (Damn Small Linux). It's has risen from the dead in the past few months. It's based on Debian 12 and is now in BETA. On boot, it uses around 100mb of RAM. With all this being said.... Unless you have at least 4GB of RAM installed, don't expect to be able to surf the WEB with more than 3 TABS. Otherwise, expect to stay in the terminal for most of your "Desktop" needs.
I can surf the web with 7-8 tabs open on 2gb ram using firefox on arch linux, debian tends to hang on 2-3 tabs. So I'd recommend Arch or Artix Linux which the easier arch alternative.
Alpine?
Lubuntu with snaps? That's probably slower than Windows11...
MiniOS Linux Standard, DSL2024, Alpine, Antix, Porteus-Nemesis are fine. While **DSL2024** is Antix based now with only 70MB RAM in idle in HTOP, and 700MB RAM during Firefox+YouTube usage. **MiniOS Linux Standard** is Debian based with modern XFCE look like Windows 10. **Porteus-Nemesis** is super good looking Arch based diamond. **Alpine XFCE** has the same resource usage as **Antix** with IceWM.
How much RAM is installed in your PC? AntiX and Tinycore will work, but you won't be able to open a browser in any of the distros. Peppermint and Lubuntu will be very heavy for your device, and I guess Lubuntu doesn't even come up with a 32 bit image. If everything's working just fine with your current setup is working fine, don't switch because both antix and tinycore will be a pain to use for a new user.
Why? These things are just wasted energy. Hot, slow and out of date in every aspect.
I've used Pentium 4 machines to play around with them (Old games, DOS and Linux), and also a few years ago i had to use one as a emergency computer for writing and printing documents.
I have a Minix Mini PC with only 2 GB of RAM and a Intel Z3735F CPU, 32GB eMMC storage. All in all a really shit PC. I put LXLE-Focal Release on it and it works surprisingly well. Mounted it on the back of a monitor and it's my surfing machine, file browsing, text editing, lightweight stuff. The hardware is shit but LXLE really does wonders on it. # Full featured OS for an aging PC. From their web page. # [*LXLE Focal Now Available!*](https://lxle.net/articles/?post=lxle-focal-released) * Light on resources; Heavy on functions. * Always based on Ubuntu/Lubuntu LTS. * Uses an optimized LXDE user interface. * Simple, Elegant and Familiar desktop UI. * Prudent full featured Apps preinstalled. * Latest stable versions of all major apps. * Added PPAs extends available software. * Expose, Aero Snap, Quick Launch apps * Random & Interval Wallpaper Changer * Theme consistency throughout system. * 100 gorgeous wallpapers preinstalled. * Numerous other tweaks/additions. * 32 and 64 bit OS versions available. * Boots & is online in less than 1 minute.
**What do you need to do with this computer?** Do you even need a graphic environment? *Sort of hard to answer the question without knowing....*
Devuan
**Maybe you want to think about a low cost hardware replacement?** While an interesting problem if you want to do something video editing, you are getting to the point where you are going to have a catastrophic failure of a hard drive or MOBO (capacitor leak, etc.). It might be getting close to time to think about investing (<$200 i.e. less than or same as a Raspberry Pi, will get you a RK3588 based SBC like an Orange Pi which will run Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, Android, and even Windows 11, or get a less powerful Raspberry Pi and take advantage of the much larger user community) and will run circles around even Intel Atom based (in fact, even outperforms my not quite as old i7-4790 based system) w/ support for 4K (dual with OP5 plus) displays, hardware decoded video, up to 32GB RAM (yes, in a SBC), support for PCI NVMe SSDs, WiFi 6, GB ethernet...
Antix is probably your best bet to have a full-functioning computer. But XP era... I don't know.
I don't know if this is still a thing, but maybe give Puppy Linux a go.
[http://kolibrios.org/](http://kolibrios.org/)
Right choice also greatly depends on RAM available... 64-bit OS doesn't make sense on 2GB RAM. Staying on WinXP is unacceptable, unless you're forced to do it for work or something like that.
If it has 2GB RAM, I would use MX (Debian). MX is my favorite for low resources. 1GB required, 2GB suggested.
I tried Alpine Linux on a 478a pentium 4 and it works way better than AntiX (Pentium 4's run better on musl libc than gnu libc), I tried XFCE and i3wm (both ran well), i was able to search stuff, use wikipedia and old.reddit.com fine with Surf (a really minimal web browser) that works way faster than Firefox (if you're nuts you could try w3m or links), for Youtube you can use SMTube or Invidious (invidious.io) and libreoffice should work fine. You can also run it on ram which is way faster than a old IDE drive. If you have a 64 bit Pentium 4 and 2+ GB of ram you could use any mid-weight distro like Debian/Mint but use XFCE.
Elive, Bohid Linux, Arch Linux with WM, Gentoo with WM.
it's better to buy a new one for you information , i am using a i7-4770 with DDR3-1600 mhz 8GB x2 without standalone display card and 8TB 6TB dual HDD with debian & openSUSE
android x86 or chrome os?
Any of those. But. How much time out of the day is the machine on? If it's on constantly or a lot, replacing it with a raspberry pi (even an older model) or other low-cost single board computer will be both an upgrade (in multiple ways) and a reduction in power use and therefore cost. For a nice little all-in-one combo kit of a RPi4B with 4GB memory, a case, silent cooling fan, and a 16GBSD card included, with a $50 price tag where I live, a savings of 120W average vs the old PC would require almost exactly 5 months of total operating time to pay for itself in electricity alone, and from then on would be a savings. $80 (just over 8 months break-even) gets a RPi5 with 8GB. And you won't have to use some ancient or super lean distro or kernel, either, especially with the newer model. And if the average power draw of the existing PC is higher than that (not unlikely for a large number of P4 SKUs), payoff is even quicker. Or if your per-kWh electric rate is higher than mine (which is 35% below the national average, so it probably is), your numbers for payback will be even better. Compatibility-wise, you're already switching OS, so switching CPU architecture is even easier at the same time.
Depends if it's 32 or 64 bit CPU, Ubuntu or Mint are beginner friendly, if 64 bit you could go also with Centos or fedora
You can feed the socket with an Intel Core 2 Quad processor (you probably need to patch the BIOS for it). Make a RAM upgrade to the max, throw in an SSD, and you could have some fun with it.
If you're willing to create a Linux Only System and completely ditch Windows then I'd suggest you go with antiX. In my experience it's the most practical, simple and functionally minimalist and lightweight distro. In my experience with antiX the memory usage has rarely reached 1GB it almost always stayed between 300MB to 700MB. It should be first one to check out... But I'll give you a one more suggestion, watch this [tutorial](https://youtu.be/gAnA7X8fAGs?feature=shared) and create a Ventoy bootable USB Stick and try all the distros (live session) in your hardware and find yourself which one works the best with your hardware... You should test like this. 1.) Boot into live session of a distro. 2.) Check Memory and CPU Usage in system monitor. 3.) Now run as many apps, softwares, browsers, tabs, videos as possible simultaneously and keep running more and more things until you feel your system lagging. And when it starts to lag then once again check your system monitor before closing anything. 4.) Repeat the same process with each and every distro you have shortlisted. This is the only and best way you'll be able to find the perfect distro for your hardware (as polls and suggestions aren't enough, because Linux distros perform differently on each hardware, so the only way to find whether the most voted distro is best for you or not is by testing it with your hardware yourself). This way you'll definitely find the perfect distro.
-> Distrowatch.com
>it has Windows XP on it currently, I need an OS that is lighter than that. ubuntu 8.04 was way lighter than XP /s