I havent used all the flavors of eos but between Plasma Gnome and XFCE the latter is hands down the fastest in responding to my commands. I especially notice it at boot.
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No surprise there. 
Not much bling-bling-tingeling-flash-bell needed, just start it. 
Try a window manager 
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nothing too interesting here, XFCE is very lightweight and goes hand-in-hand with most systems (sacrificing some modernness, but obviously you can customize it). Totally agree!
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How much faster is Xfce than, let’s say, KDE Plasma?
Are there any methods to benchmark a Desktop Environment’s speed?
Subjective perception, what else do you need?
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Hard Facts! Figures! Statistics! Diagrams! SCIENCE!!!
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Overrated 
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Source: trust me bro!
On a serious note, lighter DE do feel “faster” when the system has just booted up. The difference is especially noticeable on older hardware. Back in 2020, I was using my old budget PC from 2013. Upon boot:
- It took in the tune of few minutes to login to Plasma. It was simply unusable.
- Gnome was much faster to login, but it wasn’t very responsive in the first 2 - 3 minutes or so after logging in.
- Budgie was than both Plasma and Gnome overall in terms of responsiveness.
- Logging into Xfce instead took <10s and you could start using it instantly.
- I used i3wm mostly, which took <5s to login and be ready for usage.
To be noted, all this is for the first few minutes after boot. Use the system for 10 minutes and everything’s then cached in memory. To give an idea about how slow this system was: it took ~10-15 seconds for Firefox to launch and be usable.
Presently, I have a newer laptop. On an NVME SSD, the difference in all these DE is nearly unnoticeable. But once a while I need to boot into my alternate install which I have on an HDD. Difference between DE again becomes noticeable. The HDD is much newer than the one I had on my PC. On this HDD, logging into Plasma does take a few noticeable seconds and for the first few minutes the DE takes time to respond to clicks or launching apps. However, few minutes in, everything’s running decently good, enough that I manage to code large applications and build them.
It might all just be placebo, who knows 
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You had me already there 
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Boot, or reboot time is what I always notice first. I have to take into account how long it takes to enter encryption and root password. On my system Gnome was like 35 seconds, and Plasma was even slower.
$ last reboot|head -2
reboot system boot 6.6.32-1-lts Wed Jun 12 04:24 still running
reboot system boot 6.6.32-1-lts Wed Jun 12 04:09 - 04:24 (00:15)
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When all is said and done and perceived subjectively, at the end of the day, there doesn’t seem to be any single, universally accepted method to measure desktop environment responsiveness. If there is one, I’ll be grateful if someone could point it out to me.
It all boils down to hardware specs, configuration, use case, and of course the “subjective perception” which in this time and age seems to be the ground on which many a claims of the trust-me-bro kind of Truth are made.
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It’s all in ones head. 
Edit: Of course this too!
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@pebcak
I always say …“If you don’t know hardware then you don’t know anything!” 
When it comes to hardware, I admit I couldn’t make any claim on any broad and in-depth knowledge. I only know partially the machines I have. So the conclusion is that I know next to nothing. 
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I’ve used XFCE on old hardware. And yes, very fast. But it’s not aesthetically pleasing, IMHO. I know there are customizations to be had, but even then, it just looks dated to me. I could never use XFCE as a daily driver unless my hardware dictated that I had no other option.
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I’ve seen people doing some pretty neat stuff.
i.e.:
And yeah, I’ve just installed KDE Plasma on faster hardware than the one running XFCE as my daily driver, and XFCE totally “feels” faster ( @pebcak ).
Well… but, is it…?
I think I start to understand that though
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