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!
If you are a low-end Linux enthusiast, I would also recommend the Trinity desktop. Just as MATE is a continuation of GNOME 2, Trinity is a modern version of KDE 3. I was quite surprised how light and functional it is.
If you want to give it a shot in a VM, the Q4OS distro includes it as a default DE option. If you really want to be impressed what can be done with little RAM, try the 32 bit version of Q4OS.