Nope, Xfce on all the Linux distros on that machine, except for Elementary. I was surprised to find that Elementary's Pantheon was faster than Xfce on Ubuntu 16

Nope, Xfce on all the Linux distros on that machine, except for Elementary. I was surprised to find that Elementary's Pantheon was faster than Xfce on Ubuntu 16.04. Besides, it wasn't a test of DE performance alone, it was a combination of factors including boot time, script run time, video encode/decode, build from source time, and so on. Yes, DE performance was also a metric, and for fun I did load Unity on both 14.04 and 16.04 just to see what would happen. If I were basing it on DE performance alone and used the default DE for each distro, both Ubuntu versions would be the slowest by far. Also, 3D acceleration was not an issue, the Intel video hardware in that machine is fully accelerated in Linux and OpenBSD.