Sounds like you need a newer or faster machine. I'm running Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop, one of the heftier ones, on a 7-8 year old Thinkpad W530 with an Intel i7 2.70GHz and 16GB of RAM and the system will take anything I can throw at it without getting bogged down. Three browsers with MANY tabs open, two graphics programs, an email client, file manager and Sublime text/code editor. I can quickly close them all down and still have a PC shut down time of less than 5 seconds. Updates without a restart are nice. Win10 can be 20-60 minutes or even more to update with forced restart.
My wife's old laptop is a bottom end Acer Aspire One with 1.00GHz and I haven't been able to find any flavor of Linux that will run fast on it but the Win7 Home Edition it came with only ran fast for about a year. After that MS had added so much bulk on the form of updates that it made the laptop obsolete. Unfortunately, the devs that do the lightweight versions of Linux haven't kept things up to date and the software libraries have gotten heavier. Peppermint Linux is a decent small one. One of the few that still has a 32 bit version, for now. I'm not sure if I've tried it on the Acer. Might have to do that.
The problem I ran into was I couldn’t get the Ubuntu ISO to fit on a CD.
As for the ‘newer or faster’ - they run just fine on Windows. I’m looking for something to play with on older machines - I downloaded Win10 on an old laptop when MS was offering the free upgrade (which ran fine) but now that they’ve bloated up Win10, I am looking for something more efficient.
The Win10 experience on the laptop did convince me to stick with 7 on my main machine.