I’d say your laptop is an ideal candidate for gentoo, especially if it’s at most 5 or so years old (it must then have hyper threading, so 12 virtual cores). It has just enough resources to compile packages with decent speed, but enough restriction that gentoo’s performance boost and optimizations will make a noticeable difference.
I actually have a laptop with the same resources as yours. Your compile times will not be as bad as you expect. Just make sure to use binary packages for big stuff, like browsers, the kernel, office suite, etc.