Have tried everything since 1996. I like Fedora very much as my main system on my laptop and Slackware for self made packages.

Ubuntu is nice too on some laptops, but I don't like their release versions for some minor packages that I use a lot. And I'm at home with rpm & tgz, I can't build packages with dependencies for Debian.

It's your personal joice. If you feel at home, you've found your right distribution.

Only if you choose programs that doesn't need Gnome and/or KDE libraries... it's a myth: the newest Xfce4 requires nearly the same memory resources than Gnome or KDE. Xfce is not faster/slower than Gnome as it use the same GTK lib.