

Try Mint Mate, the desktop environment is lighter than Cinnamon. When I was running systems from that era, Mate was much speedier than KDE / Gnome 3.
After that it’s just looking at what’s running after boot up and deciding whether you need it or not. As long as it’s not hogging precious RAM/CPU don’t worry about disabling it.



Monoculture isn’t great.
Having and maintaining other options is good for if/when things go bad.