I recently stumbled upon AntiX Linux, a very lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian Bookworm (the latest version), and I really am enjoying alot of things, mainly the terminal and the system's customizability. I managed to revive my old Toshiba Satellite from 2005 (20 years ago!) and it works just fine. It can run Pokemon Red and Super Mario World on an emulator quite well. I'm more surprised on the fact that all of yhe installations I made were with the terminal, including some terminal games like Vitetris and Ninvaders.
Besides that I would recommend atleast giving Linux a try with a VM (virtual machine). For beginners, the best VM is Oracle VirtualBox. For Linux distros, I suggest you try Debian, Linux Mint or Ubuntu, as those are the easiest GUI ones. Anyways those are my words about Linux.
(Note: to all the Linux nerds, I'm not wasting 5 seconds of my life to type "GNU/Linux"."