Know what? Fine. I'll try Linux again. Tired of watching my craptop sit at 100% disk usage for 10 minutes before it starts responding. Mint is good to start with, ye?
If your craptop is using an HDD instead of an SSD, replacing it with an SSD would be a cheap upgrade you could do that would make a massive improvement.
Linux Mint cinnamon is gold standard for quality IMO. All my modern systems that can comfortably run it do.
That said it also uses more resources than your old craptop may like depending on just how old we are talking about.
If cinammon is a little slow, try mint xfce. Its a lot lighter on system resources. Last time i tried xfce it was a great performance compromise if a little unpolished in places.
If Mint xfce is also too slow you can give MX Linux a whirl. Its way faster and more minimal that mint out of the box. Yet it feels modern and allows you to install all the same programs as mint from the default software repo including flatpaks. MX fluxbox is probably as minimal as you would want to get. Try their flagship xfce first.
If you are trying to beat new life into a 25 year old dying dinosaur Puppy Linux will do it, but you won't enjoy using it.
It's mainly for movies and occasionally gaming on the go, and also my DDR machine. It's got a 1050 so it's... Not great, but it's had hard drive struggles most of its life and I've tried everything up to reinstalling windows.
I agree, mint is a good place to start.
If it turns out to be too much for your pc you could always try antix or q4os or puppy linux next, which is even more lightweight.
But I have recently found that mint is like a better version of ubuntu and I used to recommend ubuntu all the time because 9/10 times it just works.
You'll probably get a million recommendations. I personally recommend Fedora KDE Spin but I pretty much like to recommend anything with KDE Plasma for Windows refugees. Basically, every setting you'd care about is in the Settings GUI and you can use widgets and stuff if that's your thing including browsing and installing from inside the GUI itself.
The "Task Manager" (System Monitor) is really customizable and nice too. KDE Connect allows you to basically use your phone from the desktop and see/respond to texts and stuff.