Cinnamon

[The Black Pig]

Been playing around now have Sparky Cinnamon

[MoroS]

Although a bit heavy, Cinnamon looks nice by itself. How's does it handle? Any lags, slowdowns, etc.?

[The Black Pig]

At the moment I can't see any difference

[one23]

I've played with Cinnamon for a couple of hours on my Acer X480 LXDE is much more fluid. 

[Rainmaker]

Although a bit heavy, Cinnamon looks nice by itself. How's does it handle? Any lags, slowdowns, etc.?

I think the heaviness (or lack thereof) in Cinnamon is highly distro-dependent. For example the latest upstream Cinnamon 2.6 weighs in at barely 300MB after boot for me under Linux Mint Debian Edition 2. This is compared to 250MB for Sparky MATE, so that's not bad going at all considering Cinnamon is based on newer libraries and has many more visual effects. However a basic Cinnamon install on Sparky or Debian (i.e. straight from the repos) gives around 500MB at boot so that's a huge jump. I don't know how Clem optimised Cinnamon for LMDE2 but it'd be nice to be able to have Cinnamon 2.6 on other distros running that lean. I have 16GB of RAM anyway so it's hardly a concern for me personally, but still a system should always run as well optimised as possible (my older PCs certainly appreciate it), and atm vanilla Cinnamon in the Debian repos is anything but. :(

I'm loving Sparky atm and would love to use my favourite DE (Cinnamon) but I refuse to when it's gobbling up half a gig of RAM needlessly.  :P