I have spent my 33 years living in the UK. I've never seen a copper de-escalate anything.

I have 3 old Chromebooks (2gb/4gb ram and 16gb/32gb storage) and I run MX with XFCE which runs like a dream. Previously I used Arch with KDE which also ran smoothly enough which surprised me. One thing worth doing with whichever distro/DE you choose, remove all the software you won't use and it makes a huge difference!