However, it isn’t this magical desktop and if your computer is bound up by a drawing text and icons on the display then Xfce4 is not going to help you. KDE and Gnome are both a little ram heavy but that’s because they are much bigger desktops.

Exactly, they are bigger thus require more resources and will run slow on older hardware as many people complain. I personally don’t feel that GNOME is very noticeable slower but, I do believe there’s an extra very short delay when windows are to be drawn, on my main desktop because of it’s larger size but due to the fact that everything is forcefully animated. The DE kinda gets in my way with those animations instead of just click > apear like Xfce does.