hardware is a nuked MacBook Pro, Intel Core i5-4278U @ 2.60GHz, model A1502 (EMC 2875), Retina Mid-2014 13" with debian 12.5 live xfce installed (I couldn’t fully install any of the netinst candidates).
As posted before, I consider this a really slow notebook and to compare and give you an idea, I need benchmarks. Download speed works fine via USB-tethering with an android device but the installation speed is ridiculously slow. System reacts very slow after entering username and password as well.
I’ll try gnome and cinnamon later and compare.
Cat /proc/cpuinfo will tell you the bogomips.
If your old core processor is slow, open the laptop up, remove and clean the fan, remove the heatsink and clean it and the processor die with isopropyl alcohol and apply new thermal grease before you put it all back together.
If you have bad I/o with an ssd of some sort, do a spinrite level 2 scan of the drive. It reads and then rewrites all the blocks, which fixes the problem.
I used this exact model for years and idk what your expectation is but I found it to be right fast.
Don’t bother benchmarking a laptop unless you’ve cleaned the dust out, regreased the cpu and run a lvl2 scan on the ssd. All you’ll have is a number that tells you “yep, it’s slow.” And someone like me will say exactly what I just did.