Linux recs, give me them (rah)

i'm putting this down for the night because i'm getting to the point where i feel like crying (brat incapable of handling things), but since i managed to get anime recs, i'm gonna try something spicier.

i am looking to install a linux distribution on a lenovo thinkcentre m710s, which to be honest is a pretty garbage computer and somehow i think it might not even be much better than my older computer that had a 2nd gen i5 versus the thinkcentre's 7th gen i5 (it technically benchmarked better, but who knows what this has been through). i'm not expecting any real responses but here is generally what i'm wanting to achieve:

-relatively light on hard drive space
while i do plan to build a pc at some point with the highest capacity ssds and crap i can find, at the moment i am working with a 256gb ssd. so far it seems like fedora mate+compiz was pretty reasonable, sparky linux might've also been fine, but linux mint, while it is the distro i'm most familiar with, used 30 gigabytes on a fresh install. me no likey.

-easy(ish) install of desktop environments, namely nsCDE
sparky linux did manage this, as it has a hub for doing so built in. i am looking to use nsCDE because i find it really really appealing, though the mate+compiz in fedora mentioned above is nice as well. you may think i should've just sticked with sparky linux, and i would have, however rebooting after i installed nsCDE left me in a stark void of nothingness where i have no idea what i did wrong for like 20 minutes. maybe i just fucked something up, but i digress. there does seem to be a .deb package of the latest version, though it is technically 3 years old at this point.

-boots up fast and quick
i don't know why, but for something that only used around 8 gigabytes of space and was on an ssd, fedora took a long time to boot up. technically this isn't a huge problem because i am the kind of person who will leave her computer on for literal weeks, if not months. i don't care much for actually turning off my computer, but still, it would be nice.

other minor requirements are mostly just things like being able to setup flathub and wine painlessly, though i am a lot more willing to budge around with installing packages than i am an operating system. i really hope i don't seem like a stupid fucking idiot, i'm usually pretty tech savvy but i find there is a lack of good documentation or people trying to do the above (sparky linux's wiki is... really bad. they really could benefit from a user friendly manual)

i am writing all of this from a mac mini. you might wonder why i am trying to use a less powerful and much more cumbersome computer than a thing i wasted 760 dollars on.

it doesn't have a microphone jack.

thanks for your time