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!
been using xfce4 since it’s the default desktop environment for MX Linux and it’s really rock solid whilst treading the line between a full-on DE and a WM. To me it’s a lot more customizable than mate and has significantly more development behind it (can’t wait for 4.20!). With that being said i don’t necessarily have a problem with using mate and its app suite, the bottom being a taskbar instead of that just being part of the top bar is something i can get behind but you can achieve that with a panel profile on xfce just fine