Linux isn't really like that where one distro is better for certain hardware than others (the one exception being the few distros that avoid proprietary drivers like Debian). It's really more of a personal preference. If you're not sure, start with something easy for beginners like Mint or Kubuntu.
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Well first of all the "best" distros in many people's opinions are DIY ones like Arch or Gentoo and for older hardware it's minimal distros which have learning curves of their own so such lists would probably be bad for beginners.
Anyways your hardware isn't too slow so any distro should be usable I think. Choose one that is well known and that has a desktop environment (UI) you think your wife (congrats on having one btw) would like. If you have no idea, just go for the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint. Its UI is very much similar to Windows and it's as easy to use as it gets.
If you're feeling brave, you can try a distro with vanilla (not customized as hell) GNOME environment like Fedora. It's unique and known for not having any features by default lol so it's very easy once you get a hang of it. The UI is the most similar to Android than anything I'd say.
EDIT: any modern OS will be pretty slow if it's installed on an HDD (spinning hard drive). If you have that, I'd highly recommend upgrading to a cheap SSD. The difference will be night and day, especially in boot times.
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It still powerful laptop actually, any distro will work but for newbie mint ofc :)
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not sure of a tool like that but you can learn a lot about distros & reqs here: https://distrowatch.com/
for that machine, check out linux mint lmde, based on debian, if you’re looking for something stable & has minimal learning curve.
Edit: not really for this purpose. But maybe you can ask ChatGPT or European https://chat.mistral.ai/chat
i don't know about such emulator that does that but, i have an old laptop (toshiba satellite E1 vision from around 2014) and i installed void linux 32bit with xfce desktop, it became usable again. it uses hdd. a little bit slow but usable. maybe it could be a recommendation for you
anything that isn't windows will run on hardware like that, most Linux distributions are way more lightweight than even a modern browser
Though not a tool, DistroWatch is a great resource for an overview of Linux distros. Kudos for exploring the Linux OS.
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