I used to be a Xfce fan. Ran Xfce 4.10 for almost 3 years and then switched to MATE 1.8 (previous versions were buggy). Now LM MATE 17.2 ships with MATE 1.10 and its perfect.
There isn't much difference between Xfce 4.12 & MATE 1.10. Both will give similar performance and a new Linux user wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Xfce & MATE as Linux Mint team heavily customize their distro. I went with MATE as it was released first.
