Friend has an old laptop with windows 10 that he doesn’t use because too slow and freezing all the time. Wants to revive it to leave at his lab in grad school for browsing the internet and editing stuff on google docs so he doesn’t have to carry his newer laptop everyday.
I suggested Linux but I myself always used Debian and I am not sure it will run decently with such low specs. Was thinking maybe Debian 11 with xfce or something? Any better options?
Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.
Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.
I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.