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I started on mint to save an old computer and have been playing around with different distros to get the feel of them and which work best on the old laptops my kids use for school. My wife is using Manjaro now, but for my daily use I prefer Debian with i3wm because I work in the work truck a lot and all the keyboard shortcuts and tiling help a lot.
Discussion
If you wanted something lighter than Mint you could also try Lubuntu or Linux Lite, all three are good options for older hardware though 👍🏻 in my experience something usually breaks with Manjaro after a while... might just be me though 😂 your personal set-up sounds solid and practical 👌🏼
The more comfortable I get with customizing Debian the more I view the features in Mint as obstacles. I find Debian with LXQt is light enough for most of my old laptops. I've even got a Toshiba Satellite from 2009 running LXQt with i3wm. It can't do everyting, but it's impressive.
It's amazing what a bit of linux bootstrapping can do to old hardware 😎 i think that if more people realised this, and how user friendly Linux actually is these days, we would be able to massively reduce e-waste