I wouldn’t recommend installing a distro just to install a different DE. IMHO, you should be fine with cinnamon. I’m using Linux Mint 21.3 with cinnamon on an x201 (Thinkpad released in 2010), though I did up the RAM to the 8GB max. However, if you want XFCE, is there a reason you don’t want to use Linux Mint 21.3 with XFCE? If that’s no good for you, I’d recommend finding a distro that fits most of your needs right out of the box, maybe Peppermint Linux or MX Linux?