I use CachyOS on my X220 with btrfs and lzo as disk compression (lzo is very good on old cpus and makes the SSD go really fast). But I think any distro could be good on that hardware.

As a side note, I would really like an x86_64-v2 distro, people jumped from no additional instructions to v3 in no time, but these thinkpads and older pcs could really shine with that kind of optimization.

Yeah, it seems its used for passing devices to virtualized environments, but it seems, on these old bulldozer motherboards, the usb devices are virtualized (I have read a long time ago, could be wrong).

I have a ThinkPad x1 tablet gen 2. These x1 tablets are very cheap when used or refurbished and you can install any linux distro, as they are using x86_64 cpus.

I use it with gnome and cachyos, the optimizations really help and gnome has, in my opinion, the best touchscreen feel, it’s very polished for this.