Ubuntu is SLOW on a HDD (has to do with the packaging format they use), I’d personally recommend trying fedora 1st and if that’s also too slow, MXLinux is great. Solus recently got revived, but it’s still got issues so I can’t really recommend it for a 1st distro… And finally, if even MX doesn’t run perfectly, try AntiX, the best Linux distro for really low-end PCs imo.