Congrats! Your laptop will be even happier with a lighter but still nice-looking desktop environment like Xfce and you even have an Ubuntu flavor around it: Xubuntu.
I've run cinnamon on some pretty anemic systems and it was quite snappy. But I'd also been able to upgrade the memory so if it's not upgradabe that may not be as good
I'd recommend Linux Mint with the XFCE desktop over Xubuntu, because they're mostly the same thing but Mint doesn't use Snap packages by default while Ubuntu does and Mint is better suited for desktop usage due to their various nice little config tools.