By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren't as full-featured as DE's but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job's NextStep's UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/
Probably lxqt. https://lxqt-project.org/ Very lightweight yet a full-on DE (minus bells and whistles). Found on most Linux distros repositories.
Yeah I'll check LXQT. It's been a long time since I thinkered with distros an DEs. Thanks
By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren't as full-featured as DE's but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job's NextStep's UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/