For laptop I use popOS mostly cause it came with the system76 laptop. I was a fan of Debian since the 3.5" floppy days. Before that it was Slackware. I'm comfortable with all of them so it doesn't matter much to me which distro. I do keep it simple for light machines and use Peppermint on them. Not Linux but Haiku OS and OS2 work well on those old machines as well.