I used to be a Puppy fan. Boot from a CD, and ready to run. But that was close to a decade ago - at some point they changed package management. Looks like it’s still among the best for playing with on old systems.
Most of the modern Linux builds are as bloated as something you’d get from Microsoft.
And signed in as root by default. It was rather simple and the developers had a sense of humor.
A fully app loaded Mint Cinnamon is 1.8 gigs. Win 10 is 18+ gigs. You can run it on a Raspberry Pi. Somehow you were misinformed.
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.