My Xperia z3c from 2014 would be perfectly fine to use right now if Google didn’t absolutely bloat the crap out of their products and it had an easily replaceable battery. If companies would just support their products for longer or release the sources when it’s out of support i probably would have skipped several phone upgrades. But that’s probably exactly why they don’t.

Yeah, that’s what they said, 20 years or so ago

Well, there’s this which was the first result in a search for me. I would also make sure that you’ve allocated at least 500mb to a uefi boot partition, depending on what you meant by “old”. I have found that sometimes there’s a “secure boot” bootloader and one that just has the distro, but it doesn’t mean the one you expect it to be will work. When you boot up at first I would mash the boot options key and see what shows up, if there’s multiple options try them one by one. I suspect there’s a boot setting in your BIOS that’s not letting it boot properly.

I’d recommend trying to figure out what doesn’t work right between install and liveUSB. 95% of the time in my experience that’s due to non-free packages being available on the liveUSB, but not being enabled during or after install. If your issues are related to a specific component (Wi-Fi, graphics, etc.) then it’s probably something that needs third-party or non-free sources enabled.

There’s some sort of deal where a distro can’t just install non-free drivers due to licensing without you agreeing to use them, so they add a question or option to enable those during install in order to use them. They can have them enabled in the live USB for some reason. You can also do that after install by poking around in your repository selection.

These are pretty simple things to investigate once you’re used to using Linux, but certainly a bit overwhelming for someone new.

What distro are you trying out and what are the issues you’re seeing between preview on USB vs install?