Well, I believe he has a much older PC.. so Cinnamon or Mate may be too demanding. I recommend XFCE.
If either Cinnamon or Mate work, it would be much better though.
The last release of Linux Mint to support 32-bit systems is 19.3 “Tricia”. Releases since that are 64-bit only. The current release is 20.1 “Ulyssa”. So, Mint support for 32-bits is going away.
On the other hand, MX Linux’s latest release currently supports 32-bit systems and they plan to do so for a long time.
At some point everyone has to upgrade their hardware to run current software.