What I need is performance, eye candy is optional.

My primary desktop environment is Xfce, as it is more lightweight than GNOME, KDE, or Cinnamon (Mate is out of my choice), yet it has more goodies (plugins) than LXDE. But due to my 4-year-old laptop, I found that LXDE has better performance than Xfce significantly. I can run multiple heavy applications at the same time, especially Firefox and Chromium. Xfce performance drops when I run both applications simultaneously. Switching between applications is slower. If running with Skype at the same time, and doing some development testing, the performance drops drastically.

Yes, again. HP Mini 1000 series, small screen, lightweight, RAM is not big. I like Ubuntu Desktop Edition, though there is Ubuntu Netbook Remix, it is not my favourite. Because I use the netbook just like a desktop, got a lot of developers’ tools, GIMP, etc.

Ubuntu, using GNOME as the desktop environment. I like GNOME because I like GTK+. I like GTK+ because I like C programming. Then, I read an article about Xfce, which is more lightweight thant GNOME. Which is also using GTK+. So I tried it.