Yes, Xfce is lightweight; which may be seem crude.
If you select Mate or Wayland/Plasma then you would probably enjoy it more visually.
Once installed, you can select a new desktop environment at login. There's generally a dropdown or menu item that would list all available.
With those other desktop env., you can say goodbye to that 0.7GB, though.
:%s =nano=vim=g
:123
d5d
y5y
Also, nano is not always present.