It may be a bit minimal for your taste, but I wholeheartedly recommend Alpine. I'm currently running AdGuard and opentracker on a RaspberryPi 1B with Alpine edge, and the experience has been rock solid.

I'm mainly using Budgie lately, and its quite fast, even on older hardware. I would say it feels faster than cinnamon (and much more pleasant to work with imo), but unfortunately it's very unstable.

If you just want to play around with it, I highly recommend some arch based distro (because you can find plenty of obscure TUI apps in the AUR) with a window manager (be it tiling like Qtile or stacking like Openbox).

If you want something preconfigured, I've recently found instantOS, which seems to work fine for that usecase.

I use this small laptop mostly for ebooks (using the excellent epy) and music, using one ot the TUI YouTube frontends.

Not only that. If all you need to deal with are still images Inkscape, Krita and to some extent GIMP are quite enough for my students, and I teach at an art university.

iirc the firefox javacript interpreter is much slower than chrome's. I guess the lag is most noticable in JavaScript heavy sites?

If you're looking for efficiency, nothing beats a static website.

It's not because of play store. It's because not being on f-droid generally means an app is not foss. That's why I avoid connect as well.

You're probably right. I should go check out the source at some point.

I've always wanted to run a media server (Jellyfin, not Plex), but thought you need something more capable to have a good experience. Am I wrong?

You can do plenty with any old paperweight. The difficult part is thinking if what you need it to do and if that thing is worth the higher electricity usage of older tech.

Sadly I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to switch to Matrix, but telegram is so much better in terms of features. I really miss the shared media and links functionality.

Years ago I selfhosted Nextcloud and found this interaction just as clunky as using google drive. Now I'm just using SFTP which has much less overhead and it integrates beautifully with just about any file manager on Linux. Then again, using it on windows is a pain as far as I know.