New Linux user here. I switched from Mac a few months ago and wanted to try out Linux on a spare machine. It's not a beast, but it has a decent graphics card (1060), lots of ram, fast storage, etc. I found GNOME to be shockingly sluggish. KDE was better, but the animations still felt far from clean, snappy, fast.

Eventually i found my way to XFCE because i couldn't make it slow. Everything felt very snappy, no feeling of slow FPS.

That's about it for me, honestly. I haven't configured it much, yet. I use the desktops to shove some non-interactive apps like Spotify to the background. Nothing special, really. XFCE just works. Sure, the other desktops are more pretty .. but that wasn't worth the low FPS to me.