I recently was able to acquire an older Dell Venue 11 Pro 7130 with an Intel i3-4030Y and 4GB of RAM.
I installed Fedora GNOME spin thinking GNOME might be the right DE for touch interfaces. Sadly it behaves sluggishly and the touch capabilities are lacking. Nautilus for example can't deal with long clicks to simulate right clicks, making file browsing a chore since I need to plug in a mouse and keyboard.
Does anyone have any experience with older convertibles? What distro do you use to make use of the touch interface while keeping a snappy system?
Mobile Linux distributions for smartphones might offer some hints on how to tackle your problems - these apps are created in a convergent way, which makes them work well on laptops, tablets and PCs alike. Look for an alternate file manager, for example, to replace Nautilus. Check out https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/
Oh, and as for the touch UIs, not much luck if GNOME doesn't work well enough. KDE can be made to run well with touch input, but for me it needed some work to configure it. But I liked it afterwards.
There are Mobile Linux UIs (which might run better on tight resources) but I am afraid they might not be good for multitasking on a tablet screen.