Ding Ding Ding
In the blue corner, weighing at 400MB ram or less in usage. XFCE with a easy to use UI and light footprint. It has a good file manager and pretty much is the go to standard if you want a cinnamon windows like desktop but less weight for old machines and netbooks.
In the green corner, the ancestor of Gnome 3, born out of hatred for its future counterpart, we have MATE. MATE is also a lean desktop and is easily customizable using different panels if you were a mac, windows or unity desktop user. Without bias I exclusively use this on Ubuntu MATE for a laptop between me and my brother.
Which contender in the desktop ring do you prefer? Why? What’s the positives and negatives for you?
Round 1, GO!
KDE’s menus upon menus upon menus makes it look and work like W95 for me, just made of shiny plastic instead of something beige.
Also, I feel XFCE’s default looked awful about ten years ago, it looks modern and slick now, esp. with a theme like Arc installed! And it’s incredibly customisable and riceable!