With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It’s a really light distro.

Turns out this is also available in Alpine repositories, so I went ahead and installed it on my phone. Could come in handy when browsing from public Wi-Fi or such. Thanks for the tip.

You can do a really slim install of Debian that should work. For DE I recommend LXQT.

If you’re feeling adventurous, Alpine might be slightly lighter. It’s a good distro.

Those specs are not going to get you a terribly fast experience, but my laptop runs Debian ok and it’s in the same ballpark.