Hello,
Which is the lightest distro you can run a Gnome desktop (3.6 or 3.8. both not avaliable for current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS)?
Specifically, I'm looking for something fast to put on my weakly little laptop.
Gnome is atm the desktop I like best - Unity is only on Ubuntu, KDE is even heavier than Gnome and just too much for me to handle and the lighter ones all lack eye candy (apart from Enlightenment, which has the same customization-overkill-messiness-problem as KDE).
Also, a great number of standard Linux applications are Gnome and will therefore pull most Gnome libraries anyway - which is not added weight if Gnome is what you run in the first place.
Thus, I have tried Gnome on Ubuntu 12.04 and on Sabayon and am not satisfied with either because of lags and stuttering in the UI.
As cleaned up and beautiful (and well-supported) as Gnome, as slim and fast as E, where are you, my dream desktop?
Since I don't know about your existence yet, I figured hardware resources can at least be used more efficiently under the hood (hence the Sabayon experiment), and there you go with my question:
What is the slimmest OS (preferably from apt-get world, on an Ubuntu level of being "for-regular-human-beings", but I'm flexible in that respect)
Thanks, Ben

I can't really tell what will work because you haven't told us how much memory you have.

Gnome 3 is as big as KDE. If you like Gnome, then the answer is probably Mate. That would be fine in 512MB. Get Linux Mint. Do not try installing Mate on Ubuntu: it's just one person's unofficial port, and the fact that it worked well on their computer doesn't mean it will work well on yours.

I have 4GB of memory. I mainly get the feeling there are speed issues with Gnome on Sabayon and Ubuntu, it's just not responsive. That wouldn't be a matter of ram, but rather processing power (especially GPU, which I don't have)? I mean afaik there's a difference between big and slow.
I haven't seen Mate in action, isn't it sorta as boring as Gnome2 used to be? I mean does it have 3D effects? Will go look for some videos on Youtube.
Concerning Linux Mint, I'm worried about bad support. Once I had LMDE, and I literally NEVER got any answers to my problems in the forums. But that might only the Debian flavour, maybe they're fitter in the Ubuntu-based branch.

If you don't have a GPU, you're unlikely to get 3D effects running well, even with a dual-core processor. That's why Gnome is unresponsive.