The one to blame here would be the hard drive imo. These things are the weakest point of any early 2010s computers. Even though my laptop has slightly better specs than yours (they share the same Radeon HD generation GPU), upgrading it with an SSD was a very noticable night & day difference. I suggest you to do it as well if you got ≈$25 to spare. Now Windows 10 is relatively usable on it with Linux having even better performance (except for 99% of the games since the GPU has no Vulkan support, that 1% is Minecraft, runs so much better than on Windows) - on KDE Plasma, a not very lightweight desktop environment. LibreWolf launches in ≈10 seconds, Vivaldi and other Chromium-based browsers take more to load, but usually less than 30 seconds.
So the TL;DR is, if you can - upgrade it with an SSD.