Unlike Windows, the de facto idea is that most Linux distros are generally easier on system resources, which gives you the opportunity to revive your older laptop with ancient hardware specifications.
store NumPy arrays in TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) files, and read image and metadata from TIFF-like files used in bioimaging. Image and metadata can be read from TIFF, BigTIFF, OME-TIFF, GeoTIFF, ...