The issue ends up being a hardware limitation. I can't quite recall the specific issue but there was some sort of encoding thing on the CPU that prevented me from using most apps without severe performance issues. Of course browsing and so on was fine. I ended up using it as a server for some time (20 Years old at this point) and the energy costs were bad enough that I decided to put it to rest. Its now part of my own little museum of old ass computers that I let guests use for mostly for viewing pdfs and boardgame rules. I tell my family to ship me their old laptops and stuff I got like 15 of them at this point, and I have in fact used all 15 of them simultaneously when I invite a lot of nerds over. Most of them are running Fedora Atomic, a couple are running MX Linux, Alpine, and Damn Small Linux. I intend on going through the small distros at some point and do a comparison