You could try basic Debian, maybe with lxqt?
I never see the point of Debian derivatives anyway.

Or maybe try out one with a lightweight wm like fluxbox or icewm. These are more barebones i think. last time i used fluxbox many years ago it did everything i needed and was pretty cool.

maybe . . . MX linux " the most popular linux distro" /s Except i think they ban systemd.init so lots of debian based help wont necessarily work.

Meh - maybe none of these are good answers to your question.