I’m trying to decide on a distro for my n100 mini pc. It’ll be for watching content, browsing the web, using discord And playing music. I have Garuda running in it right now just as a tester to see how it did at emulation and honestly it ran 3DS games pretty swell lol. But it feels very bogged down overall. Anything really light weight that will feel a bit snappier?
It's a contemporary 4 core processor. It can run anything.
Heck, my 8gig 2010 MacBook with a core duo runs gnome on Debian without any issues.
Bazzite is tailored for gaming but it's also great overall. With EmuDeck you can turn the whole thing into a steam deck and play ur emulators with a controller.
Assuming you mean the Beelink S12 (which is the first thing that comes up in a search for "n100 mini pc"), that's quite similar to my own computer specs, which can run just about any distro, with enough resources to spare for a VM or two. I don't think it's necessary to go really lightweight or pick something special. If there's a distro you're already familiar with and know you can do all of those things on, install that.
If you like Garuda, you could always try a different Arch spin which is lighter out of the box, like CachyOS or EndeavourOS.
Trying out EndeavourOS for now. Everything seems much smoother for now. It was probably just discord ruining the CPUs life lol
Anything with XFCE or LXQt desktop? You can try to install that on Garuda/Arch you already have. Or something like Sway, but that might be too awkward from the start.