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.
Discussion
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