My machine is a PIII with 384MB RAM so KDE and GNOME seemed quite resource hungry so I started looking at XFCE. I had a chance recently to play with 3 popular XFCE Distros (actually 4 , the excluded one is XFLD of which I have already written). They are
1.Xubuntu 6.10
2.ZenWalk 4.6.1
3.Debian 4.0 XFCE version
ZenWalk 4.6.1
I happened to read a lot of praises about Zenwalk recently, so got interested and gave it a shot. ZenWalk was formerly known as minislack and is based on the popular SlackWare distro. The installation screens though not pleasing would be enough for a novice. Installation went well without any problems. As soon as I logged in I clicked on terminal icon, it took me to the boot screen(screen with boot messages) and I couldn’t return back to the graphical UI by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7 or F6. A terminal is more essential in linux, if I had problems even there, I don’t need any other reason for uninstalling it. I could have downloaded some consoles but I didn’t proceed to. The speed of booting and the overall performance were fast as the users claimed.
Debian XFCE 4.0
It’s quite surprising to see Debian catching up so early in the race with the release of 4.0.0. In addition to this, it contained the latest version of several softwares(Firefox 2.0,Thunderbird 1.5.x). Distributions like Debian and Fedora started following the Ubuntu pattern of release – a CD for a particular X Window Manager. which is a very good move. No one likes to download 3-6 CDs of software of which only 10 get used.
The installations screen weren’t as pleasing as in Xubuntu, but were enough for a novice. During installation, I had my internet on, and I noticed that the CD lights stopped blinking and the router lights started blinking. It started downloading softwares as if it’s a net install. I had to turn off the internet and restart it to install from the CD. Apart from this, I didn’t find any glitches during installation. Another welcome move is that Debian is more optimised for 486 from 4.0.0. The UI was faster and snappy than Xubuntu. I felt a lack of complete integration of XFCE and the Operating system since many application that existed in system didn’t figure in the menu (eg. Open Office). For people who don’t care much about the UI, this won’t be noticeable at all. Apart from this Debian is fast and stable as usual. It’s a good competitor for Xubuntu.
Xubuntu 6.10
Xubuntu is the Ubuntu distribution with XFCE.It’s based on Debian. Though by the time of this writing Feisy Fawn was out, I was more satisfied with Edgy and wouldn’t look further for atleast the next one year. The installation was more pleasing and friendly than the former two. XFCE was more integrated with the Operating System than the other two distros. And this is one of the factor for choosing Xubuntu as the best of all XFCE distros.
In terms of user base and usability, Xubuntu has the best of both the worlds. There was perfection which made me always go back to Xubuntu from various distros I tried out.
Xubuntu is clearly the best XFCE distro out there closely followed by Debian.
Specialis Revelio 
But I prefer Zenwalk (actually 4.8).
I’ve tested out “Tiny Me”, a shrunken down version of PCLinuxOS on a 450 MHz. Pentium II with 192 MB RAM.
Tiny Me uses the Synaptic package manager and also uses the Mandriva tools for configuring your system. The default web browser is Opera…which though not free software is much quicker than Firefox…but of course you can install Firefox through Synaptic.
One of the problems I had with this machine, is that some older CD-ROM drives have difficulty reading CD-R disks and so installing a live CD to hard drive can be a bit of a pain with lots of error messages. Xubuntu, Debian XFCE, Vector and a few others bombed out on this machine. The “base” install CD of Tiny Me is a bit over 100 MB…and so it didn’t bomb out. That was very nice indeed…it also looks pretty nice too!
i using xubuntu 7.1 Gutsy, it’s moving fast. stable, easy un/install packages based on Ubuntu Repositories. simple modern & minimalis.
I agree 100 %… 😉 xubuntu is the best…