MATE vs CINNAMON vs KDE

[Catbuntu]

Cinnamon doesn't eat a lot of system specs, at least on my computer (and my computer usually does odd things). I'm currently running KVIrc, Firefox + Flash and a Terminal with top, and it's just using ~700MiB of RAM, and ~14% of CPU... I never tried MATE on my "real" computer, just on Virtual Boxes, but perhaps I should give it a try.
I also love XFCE, my other OS is Xubuntu which I customized a bit and it's also very fast... And KDE is the most heavy of them, AFAIK.

Catbuntu

[EmpireITtech]

Cinnamon doesn't eat a lot of system specs, at least on my computer (and my computer usually does odd things). I'm currently running KVIrc, Firefox + Flash and a Terminal with top, and it's just using ~700MiB of RAM, and ~14% of CPU... I never tried MATE on my "real" computer, just on Virtual Boxes, but perhaps I should give it a try.
I also love XFCE, my other OS is Xubuntu which I customized a bit and it's also very fast... And KDE is the most heavy of them, AFAIK.

Catbuntu

Why/How does your PC do "odd things"?
Is it bc of Minux Mint or just in general?

[Catbuntu]

Cinnamon doesn't eat a lot of system specs, at least on my computer (and my computer usually does odd things). I'm currently running KVIrc, Firefox + Flash and a Terminal with top, and it's just using ~700MiB of RAM, and ~14% of CPU... I never tried MATE on my "real" computer, just on Virtual Boxes, but perhaps I should give it a try.
I also love XFCE, my other OS is Xubuntu which I customized a bit and it's also very fast... And KDE is the most heavy of them, AFAIK.

Catbuntu

Why/How does your PC do "odd things"?
Is it bc of Minux Mint or just in general?

Hahha, it happens with any distro. When I install the propietary drivers, CPU percentage is much more higher than with nouveau, and although all is more smooth, when a lot of windows are opened the effects are very slow (so I always disable the effects).

[EmpireITtech]

Hahha, it happens with any distro. When I install the propietary drivers, CPU percentage is much more higher than with nouveau, and althogh all is more smooth, when a lot of windows are opened the effects are very slow (so I always disable the effects).

Gotcha, I haven't had any issues with Mint 13 or now Mint 14 on my Intel based platform. Anyway, glad you like Mint, bc I've been blown away by it

[caerolle]

If you want lots of effects and flexibility, but not a lot of overhead, I would recommend Enlightenment. However, last time I tried the e17 package in the Mint repo with my Mint 13 (Maya) install, it reliably seg-faulted every time I tried to do anything past logging in. It could have been an issue with my proprietary graphics driver, but I didn't try it without the driver installed, as I need it for one of my programs. I don't know if they have updated the e17 package to something more stable now (I am currently using a different distro, focuses on Enlightenment, and have no issues with stability, but that is even farther astray of your question).

I love E17, but there aren't too many distros with it (just like Razor QT, which is actually another option). SnowLinux has a Debian Testing based E17 edition, which I really like. Bhodi is my favorite Ubuntu-based distro with E17, but it only does new releases based on LTS releases.

I don't know of any distros with great Razor QT versions. Siduction has a Razor QT version, but it is very bland and default-ish. It is very cool and pretty lightweight, though, and when customized it can look very good.

Bodhi is what I use. They backport the newer things, so even though the current version is based on the current Ubuntu LTS, is has the newer stuff. For example, we have the 3.5 kernel now, just the same as Ubuntu. And we will have the latest e17 release a few days from now. I am actually already using it from our testing repo, and it is awesome!

[cwwgateway]

If you want lots of effects and flexibility, but not a lot of overhead, I would recommend Enlightenment. However, last time I tried the e17 package in the Mint repo with my Mint 13 (Maya) install, it reliably seg-faulted every time I tried to do anything past logging in. It could have been an issue with my proprietary graphics driver, but I didn't try it without the driver installed, as I need it for one of my programs. I don't know if they have updated the e17 package to something more stable now (I am currently using a different distro, focuses on Enlightenment, and have no issues with stability, but that is even farther astray of your question).

I love E17, but there aren't too many distros with it (just like Razor QT, which is actually another option). SnowLinux has a Debian Testing based E17 edition, which I really like. Bhodi is my favorite Ubuntu-based distro with E17, but it only does new releases based on LTS releases.

I don't know of any distros with great Razor QT versions. Siduction has a Razor QT version, but it is very bland and default-ish. It is very cool and pretty lightweight, though, and when customized it can look very good.

Bodhi is what I use. They backport the newer things, so even though the current version is based on the current Ubuntu LTS, is has the newer stuff. For example, we have the 3.5 kernel now, just the same as Ubuntu. And we will have the latest e17 release a few days from now. I am actually already using it from our testing repo, and it is awesome!

I have heard a lot of good things about Bhodi. I have used it in the past, but recently I've been trying to use pure Debian-based distros. Still, Bhodi is really great and it's interesting that they backport packages. I personally prefer LTS Ubuntu releases, anyway.

[Sioux]

Just to give you an idea of my fossil here ...

nForce4 mainboard, Athlon64 3200+, Radeon x1300, 1GB RAM

Been dual booting between WinXP, and Mint Cinnamon across 12, 13, and now 14 and it was smooth going until 14. With 14 and 1.6, Cinnamon seems to be more sluggish, but it's probably because I haven't really tweaked my system yet. I usually disable services and stuff I don't need or use such as bluetooth and the like, and haven't gotten around it yet. But I can honestly say the performance on this ancient hardware is leagues, and leagues, leagues better then Windows7. Sometimes better than XP! I actually liked running XP on this hardware in a fake-raid array, but it wasn't necessary. With Windows7, it was. I could feel my arteries harden every time I booted or rebooted 7 without RAID. XP is tolerable. But man ... if only XP could boot and shutdown as fast as Linux Mint ...