It is still slow.

Try Alpine. It's amazing.

Xubuntu 22.04 took nearly 10 GB of disk and half a gig of RAM. I measured it:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/18/ubuntu_remixes/

Alpine takes 1.1 GB of disk and under 200 MB of RAM.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/new_lts_kernel_and_al...

Both running a full Xfce $CURRENT desktop, in a Virtualbox VM.