So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)

Linux Mint is the easiest one from the list, but all of them except Solus are fine. I personally recommend Mint or Debian, Debian Sid if you want latest kernel.

KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)

KDE should work fine, maybe with a bit of tweaking?

XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of “lightweightness”)

I daily drive Xfce and even on a beefy PC this DE is really great. It may not look cool by default, but it's very customizable and powerful. And Thunar (xfce file manager) is really good now.

Cinnamon

Another good option

it’s because of Infinity for reddit.

There's a fork of infinity for Lemmy, called Eternity. Not sure if it's usable now though.

Side note: Gnome is not as heavy as it once was. Running on a Chromebook with 2GB or RAM and haven't had any issues.

As a complete Linux noob coming from Windows, I'd say Mint is the way to go. If you're worried about Cinnamon being too heavy, Mate is much lighter and a lot of fun. I'm especially fond of their file browser Caja.

Your second choice, Fedora, is my go to system, and I'll cheerfully sing it's praises. If you want to go that way, check out the KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, or LXDE spins, but I will say it's a bit less beginner friendly. Make sure you enable the non-free repositories when you log in for the first time!

That's exactly the kind of hardware that'd get a big a boost in performance by switching to Linux. Go for it! I have so many old machines that have essentially gained a second life when I installed Linux on them. You can't go wrong with either an Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora-based distro. I am not sure what 2Ghz requirement you're talking about, but I've run Fedora on potato class hardware so I think it will be fine.

If you start getting used to Linux after a while, I'd actually suggest Arch because of how slim of a system you can achieve with it and how fast in general it usually is. Of course, if this is your first time using Linux definitely try out some of the friendlier distros first!

XFCE is a great option. I consider it middle ground as low resource needs, but also has most of the features you want in a DE. Things like IceWM or OpenBox are even lighter, but less featureful

Just try few of these from live usb and pick what you like.

You can use Ventoy and just drag all your ISO images to it but creating few USBs is easiest option for beginners.

There is nothing bad about Debian/Debian based distros and I think that it is great option I started on Mint, tryed Manjaro and get back to Mint.

You're having way too many thoughts about this. I'll give you a simple choice: It's either Xubuntu or Linux Mint.

Simply choose by which one looks better to you. Done.

In a year you can look back at your post and decide again if there is anything you want to change or you're in dire need of a Linux hobby and Gentoo is all you've ever been looking for.

Mint it is, rock-solid for beginners

Some other people said you’re thinking too hard. They’re right.

Back up all your shit, install Debian. Try out kde and see if it’s too much. If it is, install cinnamon or something.

Go with Pop!_OS you will love it :)

Mint/Cinnamon is easy and a good transitional experience. Whatever you choose, don't forget to donate whatever you can afford and think is appropriate. That helps keep these things available. GL

Prepare for the Nvidia card to be a pain in the ass, if so, maybe running the official driver on a LTS version of Ubuntu is the best option here.

Debian 12 with KDE and call it a day.

I might look into getting a refurbished ThinkPad or something before buying new hardware for this laptop, you'll probably get a lot more performance out of this than upgrading that old laptop

Why is it that in such posts I don't see PopOS mentioned anywhere? I've been using it on my 8 year old laptop and it works really well! It had Win 10 on it previously and would crash if I opened more than 2 tabs on Firefox.

I'd personally recommend Linux Mint with XFCE or Cinnamon. XFCE with the Suse style is light and has a built-in search on the start menu, which I consider a must-have.

Mint in general should offer the least amount of resistance for getting everything up and running, including the graphic driver.

Ubuntu is SLOW on a HDD (has to do with the packaging format they use), I'd personally recommend trying fedora 1st and if that's also too slow, MXLinux is great. Solus recently got revived, but it's still got issues so I can't really recommend it for a 1st distro... And finally, if even MX doesn't run perfectly, try AntiX, the best Linux distro for really low-end PCs imo.

I strongly recommend XFCE if you can't upgrade. It's the snappiest of the easy DEs, and on a 10yo laptop, I suspect you'll notice. LXQT is half a tier more difficult, depending on how much you want to tweak the work flow.

If for some reason XFCE is still too heavy and slow, you can go lighter than LXQT without giving yourself a headache, but the only true beginner openbox distro I know of is Mabox, and you seem to prefer point release distros.

Edit: You know what though? Try KDE first; if it's fast enough for you, great!

Linux Mint with XFCE is what I'd go with

Kubuntu if you want KDE. Your hardware should run it fine. Mint XFCE or Xubuntu if you want to optimize for speed.

Lets fucking go. Definitely try the three OG desktops Gnome, KDE and Xfce. The first two are the biggest ones with tons of features and a big development team. Also KDE has a memory print thats as low as Xfce which is the lightest.

Debian Stable (or testing) with the MATE desktop... I mean, if you wanna use AND learn a little bit of Linux!!! Debian is aways your friend, and it is super rock-solid! Avoid distros with poor documentation, and avoid Ubuntu at all costs... Ubuntu has weird bugs, just like Windows. If you don't like Debian, I'd say: pick OpenSUSE or ArchLinux...

I like puppy Linux. It can be a bit quirky but it is very very fast.