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I just stayed with Mate with Compiz (Ubuntu Mate) and my desktop is still as snappy as it was during Gnome 2 days.

I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness.

I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.

KDE Plasma is written mostly in QML, so JavaScript.

Mostly? Nope, just the UI elements. Much of the heavy lifting is done by KDE framework and Qt libraries (C++).

AFAIK it gets compiled AOT to C++ code. Technically, should be pretty fast out of the box.