I find KDE has the most polish of all the desktops, but it's also a fairly heavy in terms of computer requirements. Gnome 2.x ran very well on my old Atom netbo

I find KDE has the most polish of all the desktops, but it's also a fairly heavy in terms of computer requirements. Gnome 2.x ran very well on my old Atom netbook, Fedora 16 with Gnome 3.x runs acceptably (minus the small screen), and XFCE actually feels fast. I tried KDE several years ago on the same machine and it was unresponsive.