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!
Just on your Enlightenment point there, I tried Bodhi Linux a few years ago because the Enlightenment desktop looked really good, but over time they (Bodhi) had to create their own desktop because Enlightenment appeared to have almost stopped work.
Might be something for you to check out…?
Of course not - if Xfce has too few people working on it, MATE has even less than them, and Enlightenment has even less than MATE. And note that Enlightenment is not only the desktop environment per se but the E libraries (and those are no regurgitated shit - for example, some car makers have used them on their infotainment systems). I’d think it’d be amazing if those two (or those three) could do a Dragon-ball-z kind of fusion, I think those three have really similar goals. Hell, if that was actually a thing most probably I’d move to that.
I know Xfce folks have submitted patches to GTK over the years, but it’s just that GNOME’s enshittification has pregnated GTK to a point of no return and Xfce devs are very well aware of that (for example, the libadwaita thing).