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.

Use Termux, you need:

• Android Tablet/Smartphone.
• Bluetooth keyboard.
• Cheap stand 4 device.

That’s my setup to play tabletop rpg (DND5E) for a couple of years, all CLI using any text editor you like with markdown. I use: tmux, vis.

In your case: SC-IM, visidata, any text editor.

With Termux you can use packages from repo or from other distros with proot-distro, like: Alpine, Avoid, Debian, Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu.

• ChaiNNer: is very flexible and can do all of that. Node based.
• Upscayl: do only upscales with less models, but has simpler UI, very fast in AMD GPU (because NCNN).

• I haven’t tried automatic1111 or ComfyUI yet.
• All of them work offline withou limits and are more flexible than online alternatives.

GIMP has:

• OpenVINO.
• stable-gimpfusion
• gimp-stable-boy