Puppy linux is also a good option for lower spec older hardware. Now? I run mint on my combo workstation/server.
Puppy Linux feels like a slow msdos machine running a crap GUI written in pascal. Running GadTools apps from a floppy disk is a much more enjoyable experience.
Slow response times are general in mainstream OSes like OSX, Windows or Linux.
I still don't know why Linux based OSes are so crap and require recompiling everything. Take as an example Android devices. Updating the OS should be as simple as "here's my devices/ directory, read drivers from here. Here's my L/ directory, read filesystems from here. Now, update the rest of OS". Linux works like a monolithic design from the 70s despite the efforts to modernize it most of developers seem to think that desktop users are un-important.
Desktop developers don't understand the meaning of fast response and prefer to emulate all the crap invented by Microsoft&Apple in a strange love&hate relationship.
Linux users that claim it to be fast sound like those amiga users with poor standard 1200, who set them to productivity modes in 256 colours, load birdie, use glowicons everywhere, fill everything with horrible textures and later brag about the poor 1200 being faster than peecees (in their imagination probably)!!! (if my sarcastic comment is not enough clear for some of those a1200 users I'll explain that if you notice how the gui is written then it's not fast, it may be fast compared to your peecee swapping to hd when it struggles to show the background but it's still no fast. OCS and hi-res with 8-16 colours isn't fast either)
