I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
OP did say he tried Debian with xfce and it was slow, I don’t see the point in insisting on using that
Because it isn’t going to be faster to use something else else. Unless they added a ton of stuff it shouldn’t use more than a quarter of the ram. Firefox suspends tabs under ram pressure so that shouldn’t be an issue either.
I’ve done work on a old Atom with 1gb of ram. It isn’t fast but it gets the job done. You can’t just make old hardware run fast by changing the desktop