I've been distro hopping on my T450s for months now and I'm pretty sure I've tried more than 20 linux distros, different desktop environments etc. And in the end I always keep on coming back to MX Linux XFCE.
So I have a unique case (kind-off), I'm dual booting Windows 11 and Linux on this laptop since I can't get rid of Windows (because of the data that's in) and at same time I couldn't do anything other than browsing on Windows here, even the browsing to tell you the truth lags alot. Then it occurred to me, an idea "What if I dual boot a linux distro on here?". Like I just want to be able to browse stuff and learn some coding.
My experience with Linux before-hand was: I tried Ubuntu back in the day maybe once in 2020 and once in 2022 and let's just say, the experience was bad, I wasn't even able to install it properly or whatever (I can't remember clearly). Then last year I randomly had a thirst for Linux after seeing so many people's rices on YouTube and Reddit. Now the thirst was mainly for Arch-Linux, "the hardest operation system to install", I wanted to conquer it, be able to install it WITHOUT the use of autoinstall/autoscript basically the easy route. So I tried and let's just say I failed miserably LOL, 3-4 hours down the line and ending up with failure, then on my route of research I learned there's Arch based distros, so I tried Manjaro KDE and I loved it not gonna lie, it felt really good, and of course EASY to install. I still tried to install Arch and I failed again lmao. Anyhow back to present, before the T450s, I installed this certain distro MX Linux XFCE on my old Lenovo G570 and also DELL Lattitude 3380 or was it 3370 I can't remember, and it just ran great! It felt smooth. It didn't feel that outdated, browsing was normal. So I installed the same on this one and first time in ages I saw smooth performance in T450s. Though i won't lie, the looks were kinda meh, so I tried Ubuntu next and it felt so nice. The UI and everything GNOME3, though it did feel heavy on the resources a bit.
Keep in mind I only made 45gb seperate for Linux and the specs are i7 5th gen, 8gb ram,.
Then I tried Linux Mint (many versions) it felt the same, then I distro hopped alot in these recent months basically July, August and September. Like I'm pretty sure I installed, reinstalled distros like 100+ times. And many times I just kept coming back to MX Linux.
In the end, it satisfies all my needs and also just works like quite literally, it just works.
Tldr; I distro-hopped probably 100+ times and always kept coming back to MX Linux XFCE.