I'm really liking Trisquel GNU/Linux 11 "Aramo" [0]. The mini
version, which installs a custom LXDE desktop, is very lightweight
and suitable for older hardware. "Old" in this case is an 8 year-old
laptop - I have two of them and wrote about refreshing the laptops
recently [1]. One my wife uses has Fedora on it, the other one I use
and had been trying to decide what to install on it post-hardware
refresh.

The only hiccup I noticed is that the ssh-agent isn't properly
populating the user's environment after login to an X-session. It's
not a huge deal, since you can always run the ssh-agent yourself via
'eval $(ssh-agent)' and go from there.

Other than that, it's been very stable. Ostensibly Trisquel is based
on Ubuntu LTS, but other than using Ubuntu packages (modified of
course), it is nothing like Ubuntu. I was surprised to read that
It's been around for 20 years, and so has had plenty of time to grow
into its own distro.

[0]: https://trisquel.info
[1]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net:70/0/glog/laptop-refresh.md