Wayland and Cosmic are not there yet for beginners, more like beta, watch videos from Brodie Robertson, I’ll wait half year at least to try that for newbies.

But web browsers and video players are going to be painful with any distro.

This!

Even 4GB RAM is low for web browsers and they’re gonna struggle, A LOT, even with just one tab open, is going to be painfully slow to not want to use it anymore.

Old laptops like this, don’t have hardware video decoders for YouTube or any video in AVC or HEVC códecs that is used everywhere today.

You can use Gnumeric for spreadsheets and Abiword for docs if Libreoffice is too slow.

• SliTaz is fun to play and very small.
• Puppy Linux is very capable and there are Debian variants.

Bad idea, they struggle with YouTube or any video because they don’t have hardware decoders for AVC/HEVC.

Maybe can decode by software, something easy on CPU (MPEG1 maybe), and the conversion is done by other machine.

Maybe audio?

Reference: I have one of those Atom netbooks.