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.

For a server for hosting services like in this meme? I always go Debian. Incredibly stable.

You might want to upgrade to an ssd

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.

I recently put Linux on a 15 year old laptop, and tried many flavours of Linux. Debian was what I found worked the best.

I’m very happy with how responsive it has become. I do not do gaming, and it uses whatever integrated graphics was on the Intel chip.