I might just try that.. It should be possible to get this old macbook running smoothly. I hope
SO I tried normal zorin with xfce, it made in my opinion a great deal better to use normal zorin and better looking. but did not help with the cpu, I even tried Chromeos Flex, from what I read should be fully compatible with all mac's from 2009 and onward. but that was also chugging along.. SO I guess what's left is me, buing the security skrewdrivers for the macbook and opening it up to see, it it's completly dusted in the fan, - it should'nt be sinze the original MacOs just flew right through everything 
I have seen some videoes and posts from these last two months of ther youtubers who but ubunto and mint on these, extact same model as my 13inch MBA 2011 - so maby I can also try them out
Beside these, maybe a Lightweight Distro like miniOS would be an Option.
duuude I have not found this one yet.. I have found and tried, not on this macbook, but an old Acer aspire One ZA3. slax, tinycore, anti, but not mini.. I gotta, try mini and the macbook
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I hope you have more luck than I. Yesterday I tested Mini OS in a live session and my fans were permanently running, never stopping. I can't use it with my old nvidia card. It's a shame that so many lightweight, purely Debian-based distributions don't work for me.
I have found that with older Macbooks the thermal paste tends to get dried out which significantly reduces its heat conductivity. It's not too onerous to open it up and clean the old paste off with 99% Propanol (rubbing alcohol) and apply new thermal paste. While you're at it its a good time to use a soft paintbrush to clean the dust off the fan blades and blow out the exhaust fins.