Cinnamon was where I had ended up too. So now I have a couple of Linux Mint/Cinnamon machines and a Tumbleweed/KDE machine. It surprised me that I like KDE more.
I have been enjoying OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling distro unlike the Ubuntu and Debian derivatives, but the updates hardly ever cause problems and it’s very easy to roll them back if they do. It also gives you a choice between X11 and Wayland, and Wayland is working well for me on Intel graphics.
It shows they make a lot more money by being unethical than by being ethical. If it were just a little more money they could just do the right thing and raise prices a little. It’s the same reason tech companies won’t let you pay not to be tracked: they make more money from accumulating information about you than you’d ever be able to afford to pay them.
There’s nothing that brings out hostility on the internet quite as effectively as suggesting men may have flaws. It’s surprising how many men can’t handle it - which, one might argue, is a flaw. I’m going to hide now.
A laptop of that age should not have any trouble with the kinds of things you’re doing, so it’s probably more of a hardware issue than a software one, unless some rogue process is eating up your CPU. You probably don’t need a lightweight distro (unless you prefer to keep things extra-light) and if it’s a hardware issue installing one may not help. So, as others have said here, first check the running processes for anything odd, then repaste it and blow out the dust.
Funnily enough, they don’t advertise preventing users from opening unapproved media files as a feature. So that could either mean they’re sneaking it in, or that the image is not genuine.
It’s a good example of the problem with modern capitalism: you pay someone so you can listen to some music, and you end up supporting the exploitation not only of the artists but also of oppressed people on the other side of the world, while enabling some guys in suits to buy yachts.