Deb-fan wrote:Switching to a lighter desktop (or window manager) is a easy and straightforward way to save a huge chunk of system resources but is dependent on a person preferences. Would advise trying any that look interesting to you in live session isos or vm to see if it's something you'd want to do or pursue.
Do you have benchmarks to back up that claim? I posted a link that showed that the difference between KDE and XFCE in real use was less than 100 megabytes.* You may want to call that a huge chunk of system resources, but on most systems, including OP's system, I'd call that negligible.
* KDE was also running more advanced applications.