Fedora has a 32-bit LXDE version available[0], although I've never tried it. I did use regular Fedora and Lubuntu simultaneously for about a year, and didn't find it hard to switch back and forth.
I'm assuming OP is running Ubuntu 16.04 since 18.04 lacks support for 32-bit. Sounds like OP is a very casual linux user so maybe would rather not invest any effort into it, but Fedora still supports 32-bit and makes an amazing desktop experience. Highly recommend trying it out. It might render the software complaints moot since a lot has changed in 3 years.
I tried LXDE last week and was very impressed. It was very lightweight and fast, but felt complete and robust. I'm seriously considering switching to Fedora's "spin" of it.
Whoa! That's enough showstoppers for me. Where did you switch to?
When Ubuntu dropped 32-bit support, I relatively easily switched my old 32-bit netbook from Ubuntu to Debian (by changing the sources and some manual fiddling with packages). OTOH, I'm using Fedora on my work computer, just for the fun of it, and I'm really satisfied with it.
Fedora supports 32-bit boot out of the box, even on actual 64-bit OS's. The Debian multiarch image does as well, but the 32bit-boot/64-bit OS arrangement fails if secure boot is on, so make sure to turn that off beforehand in the firmware UI.
After recently trying all of the top distros, fedora is light uears beyons the others, imo. I use the lxde spin and it runs amazingly well. I love it so much I use it on powerful hardware as well.
I use Fedora's LXDE spin on my netbook, and the KDE spin on my workstation. Once I felt comfortable using Linux, I wasn't liking some of the directions Ubuntu was headed in (not that it's bad - it just wasn't targeted at someone like me), so I switched. Almost everything has always worked out-of-the-box for me, which has always been one of Ubuntu's strongest points. I used to do a lot of work with a custom kernel, and Fedora has some great tools for that kind of development. It's not as polished or user-friendly as Ubuntu, but if you like the Unix-ness of Ubuntu as opposed to the glitter, you'd probably feel more at home with Fedora, which is more traditional and generally has a more advanced community.
edit: Plus, I've always had good experiences with Red Hat's products, so I like to be loyal :)
Yes, you can, though the download will be a tiny bit larger. E.g. currently, Fedora 37 release and updates, for x86_64+aarch64+source is just a bit bellow 700GB.
Fedora 32 works out of the box, and all the features I care about work fine.
As the other commenter says, the 5.7.8 kernel in Fedora 32 is "old", and you may get better performance or features by upgrading only the kernel to the Rawhide version, currently 5.8.0RC5. TBH I upgraded the kernel but didn't notice any differences, but apparently it makes a difference for battery life.
The one annoying thing (this may be UK-specific, but it is very very annoying) is the backslash/pipe symbols do not have their own key, but are overloaded on the "L" key. I still haven't worked out how to make the "L" key produce those symbols. I bet that designers at HP thought "who uses these weird symbols anyway, let's save a key". There are workarounds using Alt-Gr, but obviously as those keys are very common for programmers that's a very poor design decision.
Try Fedora on it. I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora a while back and couldn't be happier. Not saying you will have a perfect experience but it is worth a shot if you at least like the hardware?
[0]https://spins.fedoraproject.org/lxde/download/index.html
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