Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don’t look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.
What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?
You probably want MATE, XFCE, LXQT, or god forbid Trinity.
Out of those, i personally find XFCE to be the most tolerable, and you can get some pretty decent looking themes setup for it. My system uses around 600mb on a cold boot, in theory I could get it down to 400mb but that comes with a good amount of drawbacks. CPU usage among all of those options is negligible.