I am 40 years old. I inherited an IBM PS2 Model 70 with a 386 processor from my cousins. I used it to play games like Skyfox, Indiana Jones, and Prince of Persia, create birthday invitations, and write documents in WordPerfect 5.
I still have some commands memorized to uncompress stuff with ARJ.
This is going to be unpopular, but you can easily compile both Python and R and configure them to your liking. For Python you can even use Anaconda3 and forget about installing most packages by yourself.
As for Julia, I usually just install the precompiled binary package.
So, any distribution you feel comfortable with will do.