Most laptops that ship with windows 10 are capable of running 11. I recommend finding out if the schools provides a license. When I was attending Phoenix online a couple years ago they supplied me with a windows 10 education license through Microsoft.

I remember using one called crunch bang on my 1.6 ghz Sempron machine.

I’m not well versed with Linux but I saw a lot of people saying open SUSE tumbleweed was pretty good. I’m gonna try this today for my new low power Plex/home bridge machine.