I have a 1GB RAM PC running Lubuntu. In Xubuntu is still ok, but in KDE and Unity it is not. (The condition of my PC appears clearly in this answer).
Compared to these DE-s, where stands Cinnamon? I am in the mood to try it but I thought maybe to ask first :)
I haven't found anyone who has done a direct Cinnamon vs anything else resource usage study.
Its arguable that Phoronix has done the closest to this looking at the performance comparison between gnome-shell (Mutter) & unity (compiz) using both NVIDIA and ATI graphics. They have also looked at battery usage between Gnome, KDE, LXDE and XFCE.
Since Cinnamon's Muffin is a fork of Mutter - you should perhaps assume the performance and resource usage will be similar or the same i.e. you could argue there is a direct read-across for the Gnome results to Cinnamon.
My reading of the results - and making the assumption that better performance is equivalent to less resource usage for the same work - is that gnome-shell and unity were equally resource hungry. Thus expect Cinnamon and Unity to be similar.
Results varied depending on the actual graphics card - when using NVIDIA drivers, these were equally resource hungry, whereas gnome-shell using ATI was more resource hungry than Unity.
Thus - you should expect Cinnamon to have the same resource profile as Gnome-Shell.
The study also revealed KWin trumped both Mutter and Compiz - LXDE and XFCE trumped these all.
Usual caveats should apply when trying to interpret Phoronix results & methodologies - arguments should be directed to the Phoronix forums!
