Now that we mentioned the option of a shell to install on low-power machines, it’s definitely worth mentioning LXDE as well. It is an incredibly lightweight Linux desktop environment that is performance-oriented and requires even fewer resources than XFCE. It does not require any hardware acceleration. It is very fast, flexibly configurable and doesn’t take up much RAM space.
I have used it on old hardware, and it worked perfectly, without any lags. I was extremely pleased with the simplicity and ease of setup.
