Antix linux

My 1st recommendation for any potato PC is AntiX, however, since this one isn't THAT potato and you're gonna be using it for light writing and stuff, I'd say try Alpine... It's out of the box experience is similar to arch, however you have automated install scripts for things like the desktop environment.

You could also try AntiX's parent distro - MX linux or Linux Mint XFCE, both should work nicely.

I use arch (btw) and always lie around tty. Id recommend the same for you, coz most my work, i.e programming (writing), anime and youtube can be done in tty itself. Id recommend highly any terminal based text editor. I enter GUI environment almost only for web browsing (if you guys know something for web browsing from tty, pls mention it) im gonna assume you need it more as a writer, and you are familiar with debian and not that familiar with dirty works on cli, so i cant recommend u to go with window managers like hyprland or something but if u want ram usage under 250M thats what u shuld use (i can help with setup and everything, if you want). So you may use debian with kde, ig.

Imo, using XFCE today (as some people suggested in this thread) is a bad choise, as it is virtually unmaintained, slow and not lightweight at all.
You should be perfectly fine with LXDE or LXQT on top of vanilla Debian

I don't play games but isn't https://bazzite.gg/ the latest and best shit for gaming? If so, it would be good to try a live image of another atomic fedora image https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops . I'd recommend a tiling window manager because it uses less RAM. You can also easily start with KDE and rebase to a tiling window manager if it doesn't work out as planned.