Linux Lite with the MATE Desktop

[Moltke]

I've tried many distros via virtualbox and several DEs and always find xfce to be the best, maybe outperformed for KDE since it has a lot of features that I really enjoy but not as customizable, at least in my experience which to be honest was rather short. I even installed awesome-wm in LL last year since is keyboard oriented and I really love that, but then lightdm didn't showed the option to log in, I managed to do so but then I couldn't log in to xfce, so after some trials and errors I understood LL wasn't made for people who wanted to experiment with this; so let LL be! which is just perfect the way it is. If you don't like it then by all means try another one since there's plenty out there for you to choose. Now, if you want a rock-solid stable foolproof system which doesn't get in your way and works out the box then LL is most likely what you want.