Has anyone tried Xfce? I've always used this environment, it is the one used by the super lightweight distros, should be the less fancier and thus snappier one.
I didn't like Xfce much. I like a menu bar at the full bottom of my screen, some shortcut icons on there, active programs, and some status icons on the right. I had to check what I'm currently using: Marco (MATE) window manager, with Clearlooks Appearance (and some customizations). I want my active window to have a clear different color from anythingm on the background (which is rare nowadays).
After disabling all animations, I don't think it's very resource demanding (and my laptop is quite old).