So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she “upgraded” to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it’s so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
Highly recommend installing windows 10 LTSC on it. It’s windows 10, but not removeding awful.
Edit: never mind, I see you already have Ubuntu on it. Good job.