Honestly with the difficulty litecoin reached by now I don't think it's anywhere near profitable with CPU.

I am new to this and say one month ago when I first intalled cgminer (without GPU on board ) to see what hapened, this looked like a joke.

And since then the difficulty has doubled.

With a low end GPU, you can still be on the edge of making very little profit vs power consumption, but definitelly I think you need a GPU for litecoin.

Having said that I think Ripple / XRP is a good solution as for CPU "mining" (well it's not actually mining but rather rewarding)
Don't expect becoming a millionnaire from it though but I find it to be a project that makes sense.

And when you think that Google amongst others has been funding the project, well, It can't be all bad of a project I guess.