I’ve been distro-hopping on a 2018 cheapo Chromebook for about a year. So far, I’ve tried Debian (Bookworm) with XFCE, AntiX, PeppermintOS, and now ARCH with Sway. None of the first three were particularly snappy, but they were all running full desktop environments. With Arch/Sway, I’m running about as light as I can get: no login manager, only 441 packages installed. Web browser is Helium. It’s early yet, but I think it does feel a little faster–most of the time. Helium still takes a few seconds to load, for example.
Running bare Arch is a bit extreme, but I think the real difference probably comes down to using a WM instead of a full DE. Sway is pretty light, and from what I could find, Wayland is supposed to be a little lighter/quicker than X11, but if toy want to go that way, you could use i3. Configuration from scratch can be a bit intimidating, but I looked online for shared dotfiles I liked and customized from there.
Good luck! Hope it goes all and is a fun experiment!
My specs: Astronaut (rev 3) Chromebook. Intel Celeron N3350 dual core @ 2.4 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 500 integrated graphics, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage.
I’ve been running Garuda for over a year and had a great experience. They include a toolbox app that collects and really simplifies lots of core functions like updating mirror lists or cleaning up orphaned packages, but you don’t have to use it (I rarely do). It’s been rock solid for me, no broken packages or updates the whole time I’ve used it. I’m running the dr460nized gaming spin, which adds several gaming-specific tweaks. The community is great, and I really have had no complaints. It is a little “opinionated,” so you might fell like it’s got stuff you don’t need, but apart from that, it’s definitely worth looking into.