I have a bunch of old PCs around (i like collecting them and toying around with them) and i did try to run modern stuff of them with similar results to yours, b

I have a bunch of old PCs around (i like collecting them and toying around with them) and i did try to run modern stuff of them with similar results to yours, but my takeaway is always that modern stuff is just bloated without actual need to be - at least most of the time anyway. Software doesn't have to be slow. My favorite example is Total Commander - a file manager that is still under active development for Windows which not needs almost very little memory (right now i have it open with 10 tabs -and had it open for a while- and it uses 7.3MB of memory) but even runs on something like a P133 with 16MB of RAM running Win95. It wont be that fast, but it will be perfectly usable and packs so many features (actual visible features, not stuff that theoretically might be useful but are behind 29301 layers and i may not even see them or even care about them) that i do not mind.