Is this laptop running a 32bit-only processor? How old is it?

I have a 14 to 15 year old laptop around that i still occasionally use. I run Xubuntu 22.04 LTS (64 bit) on it and it performs reasonably well. For me, the thing that makes modern Linux on older hardware work is selecting a Desktop environment that uses few resources but still has all the modern convenience. In my case, that's XFCE. It's highly configurable, and it got a decent terminal emulator (and if you need a high performance terminal, xterm is a good choice, at least for me terminal graphics demos).

I'd recommend trying to run a few 64 bit Linux distris as live system from an USB stick to see if they boot. (X)Ubuntu also has a settings program usually called "Additional drivers" that, so far, hasn't let me down when it comes to supporting graphics cards.