In terms of ram and CPU go anything diy (arch, artix , gentoo, void) and try out awesome wm with xlibre

Awesome is quite fast of you don't go crazy with configuration, and it can be used as a DE, even though it is window manager based on DWM

Some folks say Wayland works better on potato's, maybe, then try sway and river wm, they are good

Gentoo is really fun and not so hard(running on bare metal on my only machine), but it can take some time to setup it in terms of time, so it is up to you, heard a lot of good things about void and artix

Don't go crazy with kernel if you don't know what are doing

I would avoid something like hyprland and would choose more terminal applications, like yazi(file manager), bluetui(Bluetooth ), wiremix(pipewire volume control and more)

For browsers librewolf is working good for me in terms of resources. I really love qutebrowser, but it doesn't cache pages, so if you have 10 pages all of them behave like you're work with them and it is good and bad thing, for low spec machine I don't think it's good

So try it out, install only things you need and nothing more, don't start-up a lot of daemons and try out something non systemd

If you want go crazy, check DWM(wm where you edit sourse code to make it more feature rich), it's again not so scary as it sounds and compiling it takes minutes on low spec machines, so it is okay, but it is the best for cpu/ram usage