Linux

Puppy Linux is made for old machines and generally just works. You can boot it up on a live USB and see what you think. Lots of flavours to choose from.

Try mint with Xfce - on 64 bit machines and then go lighter.

I'd suggest Linux mint Debian edition, at least for the 32bit machine. Many distros have stopped supporting 32bit lately.

It should be fairly user friendly.

Considering that you're planning to use this with family members who aren't tech savvy, and as you're essentially new to Linux yourself, I would suggest something like Zorin OS. The familiarity and ease of use should help you get started fairly quickly, even for newbies. There are a lot of other great distros, of course, some of which were mentioned here, but the learning curve for those can be just a bit steeper. As someone who's essentially the "tech guy" of the family, believe me when I say you don't want them to keep bugging you about questions or tech help because they "don't understand" Linux. You want something that you just install and leave be.

Speaking of something that you can just install and leave, this isn't strictly Linux, but a great OS to use for non-tech savvy family members is Chrome OS. Get Chrome OS Flex, install it on an old laptop, give it to your family members and call it a day. I've had success with it for some of my family members who've wanted to revive old laptops. It's a lot more limited than full featured desktop operating systems, of course, but it's perfectly suitable for the basic stuff. Best of all, it's so easy to use that you usually wouldn't even have to play tech support for your family for it.

My favorite very light is peppermintOS, I think you may have to go back to version 10 for 32 bit though.

since you're a noob, idk if this will be very helpful to you, but

i used debian with awesomewm on an old pentium 4 from 2004-2005 and it was pretty fast! like a modern low-end computer. but you'd have to configure it to be noob-friendly/have patient users. i don't mind it cuz i enjoy tinkering, but i imagine it could be very frustrating for other people.

i'd give you my awesomewm config (i configured it to be super minimal, but also familiar, as i was trying to create a desktop environment that could be used on older machines), but unfortunately my desktop no longer has a power supply, so i can't access it :')

Browser choice is probably going to make just as much difference as distro choice. Modern browsers kinda need at least 1 GB to be usable, ideally more. Depends what you do with it of course.

Try Pale Moon, Falkon and Konqueror.

I've used Debian on an old netbook with an Intel Atom and onyl 2GB RAM. The experience wasn't so bad but web browsing was definitely a pain. Video calling and watching YouTube (Firefox) was very sluggish and annoying to deal with. It's fine for working with documents and watching low resolution videos locally but that's about it.

I've also tried antiX but a lot of the defaults were annoying. If you (or your family members) can deal with it, then it's probably the best lightweight Linux distro out there.

are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.

In this case, I recommend just leaving your family members to do their own thing. From my experience, it is very hard to manage other people's Linux issues if you don't have decent knowledge on it yourself. If they don't want to upgrade, that's their problem. Not yours.

Lubuntu!

Not a Linux power user, still very much new although I've done a bit of distrohopping before.
I loaded Fedora with KDE on an old laptop from 2012-13ish last weekend. Been having a good, smooth run with it so far so that's where my vote goes. However, the memory specs you indicated for your family's hardware might be tough.

I'd like to do something similar on my Pentium 3 box. Maybe Debian with a really light WM would be a good fit, maybe IceWM? It only has 512MB of RAM though so I might have to go even lighter than Debian. I also have an Athlon XP box with 2GB of RAM, but that's too new to be fun. :p

I've said my peace about distro and desktop environment in another comment, but to answer the piece about what you can do as compared to Windows, Linux can do the vast majority of all your daily tasks. There are a couple of big sticking points, generally.

Microsoft products, i.e. Microsoft Office. There are alternatives available in the Linux space that do a great job and are good enough for probably 95-98% of people, but there are cases where they don't quuiiiite match up. Formatting PowerPoints, for example. You may save a *.pptx from LibreOffice and a colleague will open it in Microsoft PowerPoint and it doesn't look the same at all.

The other major software suite that keeps people in Windows is Adobe. Photoshop? Lightroom? Premiere? Not available on Linux. Again, there are alternatives, but they're never quite as good. I say this as a photographer that runs 100% Linux all the time, I miss my photo editing software! I used Capture One, but the same principle applies. There's no Linux release, and you can't get it running on Linux no matter how much you tinker.

The third biggest sticking point is gaming. You can game on Linux. It's better now than ever. I run AAA brand new releases on my PC, and again I'm 100% Linux. BUT! It does frequently require a little more elbow grease to get working than people are used to, and often times you can never get it to work 100% as well as it would in Windows.

Sorry for the big wall of text. But finally I just want to say, none of this is to dissuade you from putting Linux on those machine. Quite the contrary! I want you to be aware of what the pitfalls may be, so you can look out for them. I'd hate for you to go in expecting everything to be 1:1 with Windows, only for something to not work and it feel like a bad experience in the end.

those are very low specs for every day distros (meaning usable for the general public), you might get away with linux mint xfce, if it ends up usable on those machine and not lag too much then don't bother with anything else, otherwise you might have to install lighter stuff like antix or lxle. If none of the above are usable you can always install puppy linux, it can run on a toaster but is not very pleasant to use. note that regardless of distro, surfing the web is going to be a chore due to half of the modern internet being heavy as fuck and hard to run, you might want to look for alternative frontend to websites like piped for youtube, urlebird for tiktok etc.

For a more "friendly flavored" distro, MX Linux is Debian-based and comes with a bunch of quality of life tools

There are some distros out there intended for low power machines, but usually you'll be fine installing whatever distro you want and using a lightweight desktop environment for it. Any distro running a DE like Xfce or LxQt should feel pretty decent on older hardware.

Void's xfce desktop release is awesome for old hardware but it takes a bit to setup.

I vote Ubuntu, I started as a complete noob about 10 years ago with them and at first it was frustrating and tough, but now everything is just done for me, software updates, sure! I all the sudden want to want a windows-type application, sure! I love that it comes with Firefox, which from what I've read should make your family safer from the initial launch of the browser, no matter where the site they want to reach.

I'd suggest Debian with LXDE, which, from my personal experience, works pretty fine on low-end computers. You can replace LXDE with your choice of Windows Managers for an even lighter system, but that might be a little hard if you've never used Linux before.

Anything with Xfce or MATE, such as Mint Xfce or MATE

Would also recommend Debian or Puppy. Maybe also take a look at Distrochooser?

AntiX is quite good on older hardware but beware of the fact they don't use systemd. Nice effort to try and use newer init services but a lot of things really depend on systemd being installed.

WattOS (which uses systemd) is also very performant on old rigs but it needs more tweaking OOTB I'd say.

Alpine Linux is one to look at.

MX Linux works good on old hardware.

If you're looking for a DE, XFCE might even feel sluggish on older hardware. You can go lighter with LXQt or use the Pixel Desktop that Raspberry Pi OS has (which is modified LXDE).

I would suggest Debian 12 XFCE or Debian 12 LXQT. Debian releases are supported for 5 years, but it gets a new release every 2 years. You might have to help your family members do the upgrade every 2 years which might be problematic.

Another option would be either of those DEs (LXQT or XFCE) but on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is rolling but its packages are tested before being released which makes it safer than arch for a noob. It also has automatic snapshots which can be easily restored if anything goes wrong. And since it's rolling, you can configure automatic updates and never have to help your family members upgrade every 2 years (like on Debian or any LTS Distro).

Codecs can easily be installed using "opi codecs", so you won't have to fool around for that too.

I've been running Tumbleweed for a bit now, and I can say it's just like Windows for the ease of use, especially if you install a packagekit frontend like Gnome Software so that your family members can easily install new programs from repos or flatpak.

Whatever you do, don't use Ubuntu or its official variants. It's too bloated due to snap and other things they do by default.

I recommend arch linux. Also most desktop environment are light enough to run on old hardware. Just disable file content indexing

I would suggest Mint. Considering the hardware, the XFCE version. Have you looked into any hardware upgrades for these machines? I've found that a simple ram or hdd-->ssd upgrade can be rather inexpensive these days.