Suppose you’ve got an old PC - for arguments sake, assume a late 2000s PC with only 2GB RAM - which DE would you choose?
Note that whilst a simple WM + some lightweight apps might be a better option, to keep things simple, I’m limiting this poll to just DEs - and too ones which are still being maintained.
Also, in case you’ve voted for a non-obvious/“other” option, I’m curious to hear about your experiences on running that DE on an old machine - and why you’ve selected it over the more obvious choices.
On a machine with 2 GB of RAM, what is going to make the biggest difference is using a 32 bit distro. Everything, not just the desktop environment but also all the apps, is going to take about half as much RAM. At 2 GB, that takes your system from functionally useless to quite useful ( especially if you plan to open a web browser ).
There is an option you did not list that impressed me recently. Trinity is a desktop environment that is essentially modern KDE 3.
The 32!bit edition of Q4OS makes it easy to install Trinity. It is basically Debian under the hood so you get access to all those packages ( at least the ones available on 32 but ).
32 bit distros also create the problem of being unable to access more than 3.2 GB RAM, as opposed to 4 GB RAM.