The review is not good, but there is now a new crew trying to resurrect the lovely low resource option after the death of the creator. I used it for awhile and found it quite comfortable and quick. Everything you need, and nothing you don't.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20230807#peppermint
One of the problems I have in taking the Distrowatch reviews at face value, at least for every distro is that they test them in virtual machines. Virtual machines have emulated hardware (software pretends to be hardware) and need specialist kernel drivers. I don't know how the hardware it emulates compares to common hardware used by real people. But there's no argument that things are slower for a VM. A live distro might be a better way to go about it. It'll likely be slower than a VM (if it doesn't fit into RAM entirely) but at least you'll find out if it works on your hardware. Unfortunately, not all distros let you test it this way.
Maybe I spoke too soon, the review mentions the author testing it on his ASUS, so maybe he tested it on bare metal along with a VM?
Every DistroWatch review I can ever remember reading has tested distros on both virtual machines and bare metal.
"Every DistroWatch review I can ever remember reading has tested distros on both virtual machines and bare metal."
I'm pretty sure you're correct Mike.
I use virtual all the time, and sometimes my virtual is as fast if not faster than the host. Depends on two things - how much memory and hd is allotted to it, and how old and cluttered the host is. And of course my virtual is pretty limited in software because I only use it for specific things. It stays a bare bones distro.
In fact it may run in memory alone at times which would be quick. If I used it like my host with multiple programs open it would probably come almost to a stop.