I was recommended a distro that doesn’t use Gnome (Lubuntu). The system I was working with is very old and some light research made it seem like Gnome is pretty resource heavy.
Instead one should recommend using KDE or Gnome and turning down all of the graphical settings if needed to improve performance.
0: I care about responsiveness, so I've always disabled animations on every device, so I have no experience if some animations can run at 60fps on some hardware and 30fps on others.