I’d go with a “light” DE for now, or a WM if possible (although it’s very different from windows). Your laptop isn’t bad - it’s actually better than mine (i3 with no discrete gpu), but i added 8gb ram (now it’s 12gb total) and it was a game-changer.
Imo, Mint or Debian is okay if you don’t want to stray far from Windows but your choice of DE is pretty limited with a small amount of ram. Maybe use xfce?
Also check out antix, puppy linux, or lubuntu. Those might be better choices while you haven’t upgraded your memory. Idk much about dual boot since I use Linux alone on my laptop or vm on my desktop.
Linux can definitely make that thing fly, although the biggest limitation will be RAM - not from the desktop environment you choose, but from the web, depending on how many and what kinds of websites you rely on (for example I regularly use 20-30GB of my 64 through figma, pitch, Google docs, notion, ClickUp, and sites I develop that tend to be video and image heavy). Were I you, I would prioritize the 8Gb ram upgrade.
Aside from that, which distro you choose won’t make a huge difference. Some claim desktop environments like gnome and kde plasma are too heavy (I assume they mean in graphics processing and ram usage) and will insist on something like xfce or sway. Those are invariably very fiddly to set up, so if you’re a beginner, I would recommend sticking with gnome or kde despite. These will be the default on the distros you mentioned. Mint MATE edition would be your best bet for a classic desktop environment that might tick the “lighter” check mark if you really must.
I'd probably drop openSUSE Tumbleweed with LXQt on it. But that's my preference for low-spec machines. There's any number of distros with "lightweight" GUI's that you can use. XFCE/MATE/LXQt probably being the ones that will give you the least headaches.
For a desktop environment, I suggest xfce or lxde. They're very lightweight. As for the distro, all the ones you mentioned are Ubuntu-based. Even though there are some lightweight Ubuntu-based distros, like Zorin and Bodhi, you can do better. I'd suggest going for something lighter, such as the Arch-based EndeavourOS (xcfe is the default DE so it's very well-supported).
Now, if you want something even more lightweight that's still Debian-based like Ubuntu, Mint et al., take a look at BunsenLabs Linux. It's blazing fast, extremely light and very user-friendly. It doesn't use a traditional desktop environment. Instead, it uses the Openbox window manager, which requires much less resources - especially RAM, which seems like it'll be the bottleneck on your laptop.
WM means Window Manager, it mostly just manages window positions, tiling, decoration, and other Window related things. WMs usually need more configuration than DEs (Desktop Environments), some don't have default panels, widgets, etc. So you have to configure those yourself.
That allows them to be more customizable and lighter, but makes them a little harder to configure.
I agree 110% with everyone that is mentioning your DE is going to be an important choice. I run Tumbleweed, and moved from KDE (which I love for its customization and effects) to Enlightment, and I've seen the load (measure of how busy my system is) go from an average of 8 or 9, down to 2 or 3. Any distribution can be configured to be using minimal resources if you spend the time, if you want minimal out of the box, there are many that have that option too, but your DE is going to affect your performance a lot more than any minimally setup OS. That being said, Chrome and having lots of tabs open is going to kill your memory usage...
I would try and avoid GNOME and KDE desktop environments. Also would recommend avoiding Zorrin. It was one of the first distros I used and it wasn’t very stable and software compatibility was rubbish.
Mint is really good out of box, and if Cinnamon is too heavy they have an iso that ships with xfce which is a lot lighter (and uglier imo)
Apart from Ubuntu/Fedora (which are Snap/Flatpak heavy), I think you would be OK with any Linux distribution. I have a Intel Atom N270 and 2GiB of RAM happily running Debian Bookworm and KDE (with an SSD) your talking about something with far more power.
For me the considerations are as follows.
RAM
You've listed 4GiB of RAM, looking at my PC now (Debian Bookworm, KDE Desktop, 2 Flatpaks, Steam Store and Firefox ESR running), I am using 4.5GiB of RAM.
2.9GiB of that is Firefox,
~800MiB is Steam of which 550MiB is the Steam Store Web Browser.
~850MiB is the KDE desktop
Moving to XFCE or LXDE would help you reduce the Desktop RAM usage to 400MiB-600MiB, but you'll still keeping hitting memory limits unless you install an addon to limit the number of tabs. Upgrading 8GiB in would resolve this weakness.
I get by on the Netbook limiting it to 3 tabs or steam.
Disk Storage
You've listed 500GiB of HDD Storage, this means you want to avoid any distribution which pushes Snaps/Flatpaks/Immutable OS because the amount of storage they require and loading that from a HDD would be insanely slow.
Similarly I would go for LXDE or KDE desktops, both are based on creating common shared system libraries so your desktop loads one instance of the library into memory and applications use it. As a result such desktops will quickly reach 1GiB of RAM but not increase much further.
Also moving from a HDD to SDD would give noticeable performance gains, the biggest performance bottleneck as far back as Core 2 Duo/Bulldozer CPU's was Disk I/O.
GPU
The biggest issue will be the 710M, I don't think NVidia's Wayland driver covers this era so you'll be stuck on X11. Considering the age of the GPU and the need for the proprietary driver, personally I would aim for Debian or OpenSuse the long release cycles mean you can get it working and it will stay that way.
From a desktop perspective, I would install KDE and if it was slow/tearing I'd switch to Mate desktop.
KDE has some GPU effects but is largely CPU drawn, it tends to look nice and work
Gnome 3 choses to use the GPU even when its less efficient so if it doesn't work well on KDE it won't on Gnome.
Mate is Gnome 2 and works smoothly on pretty much anything.
Cinnamon is Gnome 3
XFCE is like Mate is just works everywhere, personally I find Mate a more complete desktop.
If you still want something lighter than XFCE you can try a window manager like dwm. It’s really light and you can customize the entire things by modifying the source code. If you just wanna customize simple things (color, font, key binds, etc.) you can edit a neat little file called config.h
and doesn't mention that they are a C programmer or anything. It is extremely unlikely that OP
can customize the entire things by modifying the source code
because it is extremely unlikely they would have any idea as to how to do such a thing. How many people, on earth, in total, can set up, run, and edit the source file of a tiling window manager? Now remove from that value those who are existing linux users. Functionally 0%.
This person wants to start using linux, is asking very simple questions. They are asking here which suggests they do not have a deep and rich existing network of people in their life to provide 1-on-1 support. Otherwise they'd ask one of their many sysadmin friends for individualized advice. You are suggesting to them something which takes a pretty wide diversity of skills and knowledge. And since the specific thing you are suggesting is a window manager, when they can't figure out how to use it, they will be unable to use their computer.
I wouldn't advise a beginner start with vim on day 1, but at least if they did they'd still be able to use the computer for things other than text editing. And find a different text editor while they learned vim.
This is stunningly bad advice, verging on sabotage. Why do you want people to hate linux?
In a way I did say if he wants something “lighter” than XFCE. I should have said “You have to start with something like XFCE, gnome, etc. Just to get your the general feel of linux” Then if you wanted something lighter you can try dwm.
He can easily install dwm, or any other wm and choose it from his log-in page. If he doesn’t like it he logs out and chooses another ones that suits him well.
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