For these specs, I would recommend Zorin OS Lite. 
Zorin OS 15.3 Lite is currently available and Zorin OS 16 Lite is Coming Soon
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Also the hdd is a spinning drive, personally i would change that one with a ssd to gain more performance.
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I totally agree on that, I am also planning to install SSD instead of HDD, but here where I live, SSDs are expensive and I can't afford it right now.
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Oh!
My system specs are similar...
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz 2.50 GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon 7500M/7600M Series
RAM: 4GB
HDD: 500GB
Make of Computer: Sony laptop made sometime around 2013-14.
Model: Sony Vaio SVE15127CNB
Do you recommend a non-gnome distro to me too?
You can try Linux Mint but I would prefer Zorin OS Lite 15.3
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I would prefer mint over Z Lite 15.3 as Z 15 uses Ubuntu 18.04 as its base...
And when Z Lite 16 is released it will certainly be a better option as compared to mint.
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Ubuntu 18.04 ain't exactly broken...
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Gnome use 1-2gb memory while xfce uses way less. But it all depends on what you install.
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But waiting one more month for Z 16 won't do any harm either .
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Hum...
Do you have one of those?
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I like to be optimistic 
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Well if they truly wanted it to be like Windows then they'd have to remove support for a large number of peripherals like my Dell 1110 laser!
To be fair I have had some video/rendering issues with the Gnome based versions of Zorin but not the XFCE versions.
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I saw how working linux on ssd rocket launcher. HDD is slower. I will soon buying bigger ssd and waiting for xfce to exchange hdd. That nice if on next version Zorin you can choice diffrent desktop kde,gnome,xfce etc. Of course also will be great one iso from Zorin with 3 type installation - pro,core,xfce.
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Knowing your spec, no wonder you can't get the best of it when you use Zorin OS 16 Core. I use Zorin Lite because my spec is 4gb ram and HDD, having that I considered my laptop as one of those old school laptop that can only be revived by Linux distro like AntiX, Q4OS and Zorin Lite. (Though I can play games smoothly with steam having this low spec laptop. hahahhahaaha)
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Q4os was released new version a couple version.
My PC
#CPU: Quad Core Intel Core i7-4790K (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 4001/800/4000 MHz Kernel: 5.11.0-40-generic x86_64 Up: 5m
Mem: 1483.8/15949.5 MiB (9.3%) Storage: 6.03 TiB (1.0% used) Procs: 307
Shell: bash 5.0.17 inxi: 3.0.38
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As to the original posters wondering why video playback is so erratic on Zorin that is because hardware acceleration for video on Linux is a mess.
You have multiple approaches that are not cross platform or cross vendor so some software supports this, that & the other, linux web browsers often have GPU video decode disabled by default.
The good news is that the Khronos Group behind OpenGL and Vulkan have developed a Vulkan Video Support specification and its now working in development branches of the open source Mesa GPU driver but only for one AMD GPU at this time. The downside is it will take some time for the above to bear fruit with software/drivers/distros all being linked up.
There isn't a whole lot the Zorin team can do about all of the above but partnering with a browser like Brave or Vivaldi for a ZorinOS edition were it has Intel's VA-API GPU video decode enabled out of the box would help. This though is a matter of money.
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No issues here, i have a nvidia gtx 1070 and have 0 issues with hardware acceleration for video's on linux.
I use firefox, didn't change anything in it.
If you look at the gpu from the op it is an old low end gpu, it has nothing to do with mesa gpu driver or vulkan. It's because his gpu is cr ap.
The Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail) is a low-end integrated Bay Trail graphics card found in certain Atom models (Z3770), nettops (J2850) and notebook SoCs (N3510). It supports DirectX 11 and is based on the Ivy Bridge GPU. Clock rates and shader cores, however, are considerably lower.
People need to understand that Linux is not Windows, Windows gets from every developer awesome drivers while in Linux developers care less. There are some developers like Nvidia who finally deliver good gpu drivers or hp with their drivers for printers and so one. But drivers that don't get released needs to be build by hand by "someone".
If you buy a car lets say a volkswagen, you can't compare the specs with a lamborgini.
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