If you have an old or not very powerful machine, such as an old netbook, XFCE is an excellent choice. It is quite lightweight and strikes a balance between lightweight desktops such as LXDE or LXQt and full desktops such as KDE and GNOME, described above. The shell is light on computer resources, with plenty of customization options on-board. All this makes XFCE one of the cleanest and easiest environments to use, especially when you want a non-resource intensive environment with no hardware acceleration.
My experience with this shell has been overwhelmingly positive. I used it for about a year, until my computer’s hard drive crashed to kingdom come. After that I started looking for another ideal environment.
