So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she "upgraded" to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it's so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
Just install xfce Or mate de with ubantu Or mint or any other distro except arch
Why not arch?
Can break very easily always update and update break and also not noob friendly
I've had more breaking updates in Ubuntu LTS releases than arch based ones. Especially when at some point you always find yourself forced to use PPAs.
To me, being "noob unfriendly" is disabling flatpak to push a (semi) proprietary broken mess.