Puppy or Debian with openbox or another light wm , is crunchbang still a thing ?.

Upgrade that box or repurpose it for something else. Web bloat has made 2gb machines useless for browsing and 4gb marginal, if the user needs Google docs, put in 8gb or more.

Mint.

It's extremely stable Linux for your grandma, that comes with every tool that she will ever use and on the cinnamon interface all those tools are exactly where she will expect them to be if she is used to using Windows.

I've gotten three boomers to use it and they hardly ever ask for tech support because it's so stable.

Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.

for linux and the most basic of basic tasks, i'd look at peppermint. it's what i put on all the old crap here with 'marginal' specs that choke on windows. debian stable xfce based. base install is pretty sparse, not even a browser is included initially. a utility pops up after first boot to facilitate installing a browser, media player, and a few other things if you want them, or the entire debian stable repository is also available. one thing of note. with only 2gb ram, it's gonna be tight, whatever he runs on it.

his use case is screaming for a cheap chromebook, though. so at least consider that instead. an old laptop like that might make someone a nice little pihole or something, if it's not ready to be put down for good.

honestly the distro doesn't matter so much as long as the hardware i supported. run a minimal desktop, disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.

I used fvwm on Debian for many years on old computers. worked great. now I have kde/plasma on arch. my 10 year old laptop handles it fine...

Raspberry Pi OS or antiX.

alpine

There are plenty of distros for very low end pcs, but they tend to require more tech skills to use. I have experience with a friend in a similar situation. I installed with mx linux for her and she is liking it. The performance is pretty reasonable and it comes with various tools that make it easier for people with less tech skills. The only extra thing I did was install the 32 bit version of firefox, because it makes a huge difference in low ram devices.

Debian can be pretty light/small on a clean install and xfce should run fine on 2gb. Although the biggest thing is gonna be if the laptop has fast storage or not. Since its a celeron it might not be upgradeable, and if it doesnt already have an SSD any desktop will feel slow

Personally if I really wanted to squeeze all the performance I could for web browsing I'd go with minimal Debian and RiverWM but thats a bit more involved

If your friend is not tech savvy person, i would go with Mint XFCE (maybe Zorin OS Lite). Surely, it will be not as lightweight as Debian, but it will be much more user friendly for him

If he actually feel comfortable tinkering with OS - along side Debian maybe Bodhi Linux or antiX? I tried both of them on one of (in)famous Intel-based netbooks with 512mb RAM and they worked quite well.

ZorinOS

With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It's a really light distro.

I think Slitaz is still around, I always liked that for older machines, I was going to try it on an AMD C-50 laptop I pulled out of storage recently, except I don’t have time for messing around.

VoidLinux

AntiX but sadly all it's desktops only support x11.

AntiX or Alpine

minios https://minios.dev/

Fedora.

It seems to be easy to manage and fast to install.

SUSE is slow to run and self-update.

Debian is far behind and Ubuntu seems to always have an issue during or right after installation.

Lubuntu has always been solid for me for low spec machines.

With only 2 gb of RAM it will be slow, there is almost no avoiding that part.