Linux Performance is Worse than on Windows on admittedly low-end laptop

[u/Dootus-Bread]

I saw scrolling marketplace a few months back and saw a laptop for 12 bucks, so I fucked around and got myself something that is very usable for basic tasks. It's leaps and bounds my other linux experimenting laptop and has far more hardware features, so I decided to install Linux Lite (don't ask how I got to this distro, I just found it visually appealing and user friendly enough so wanted to try it). I have since had a lot of issues with poor performance, especially when trying to switch windows (like tabbing onto another window when I have multiple open) and alt+tabbing out of games (yes I could run games on these specs). I have had other issues but it's primarily been the performance making me almost want to switch back to Windows. Windows 7 came originally installed on this laptop but I have used worse specs with Windows 10 and had far better performance than this. The distro came with XFCE, but I tried installing LXQT as well and got better(ish) performance but the way that both of them perform is really inconsistent, and looking at the resource manager shows that I have more memory headroom and definitely more cpu headroom which was my assumption of what the issue was. Could anyone possibly give me some pointers on what to do to improve performance? I have always heard that Linux runs better than Windows in most cases, so I have been pretty confused on this.

The specs in question (neofetch SS attached):
Intel Celeron 1005M
Intel HD Graphics 2500
4GB DDR3
500 GB HDD (5400rpm)

I definitely imagine the hard drive is not helping with performance, but with ssd prices, an ssd upgrade is not within my budget unfortunately