Quoting Erik Christiansen (dvalin@???):

> Thank you Eric. I remember using enlightenment around a decade ago, on a
> laptop, but don't recall whether it came up as fast as LXDE does. I'm
> not sure that a desktop has many important qualities after that one.

If you last used Enlightenment a long time ago, I think you'll be both
shocked and impressed at how much faster and leaner it is. (I used to
work with Enlightenment's authors Mandrake and Rasterman at VA Linux
Systems, Inc., back in the day.) But I'd also recommend looking at its
stable fork Moksha Desktop, a variant of (your choice of) E17 or E19.

http://www.bodhilinux.com/2015/04/28/introducing-the-moksha-desktop/

tl;dr: The Bodhi Linux distribution kept tracking Enlightenment as it
progressed through from E17 through E20, but were dissatisfied with how
bugs in the stable release were seldom fixed because the developers were
always concentrating on the next rewrite. So, they forked off a stable
copy of E17 and later of E19, and maintain it.

(As they point out, Moksha thus occupies the same relationship towards
Enlightenment that MATE has to GNOME3, and Trinity Desktop Environment
has to KDE4.)

Anyway, I find it a worthy competitor to LXDE for speed/lightness.