I have a similar 2600/cedarview netbook which is currently running mint 16 with the MATE desktop. I've had xubuntu 12.04 and kubuntu 12.04 to 13.10 running on it but MATE has become my favorite GUI for a low powered machine. It's faster than KDE (though you can set up KDE to run pretty well in 1Gb) and I just don't like XFCE. And I won't run a non ubuntu desktop in ubuntu. Mixing & matching desktops is just silly.
First off, I have to point out that you should not be using a gnome 3 or unity based desktop on cedarview based hardware. Sorry, but that's all there is to it. You don't get decent 3D acceleration and I seriously doubt you ever will. I don't know where you read that such drivers exist in repos but ... all I can say is that there's a lot of very good info on ubuntu on the web and a lot of very bad too.
For example, there is a right way and a wrong way to get this gpu working in 12.04 and there are many, many things that point you to the wrong way and far fewer that tell you the right way.
Which is ... install 12.04 and keep updating until there's nothing left.
There's a reason that cedarview-graphics-drivers don't appear in the repos anymore. Those drivers were moved upstream into the linux kernel and they're not appropriate anymore.
Mint 16 is based upon ubuntu 13.10 and it's still using the gma500_gfx driver. That's not going to change.
According to glxinfo | grep direct I have direct rendering, but according to glxgears I'm getting less than 150fps, which isn't good.
This doesn't actually bother me because it's a netbook. I don't use it to play video, just for knocking around out of the home. I can certainly understand how it'd be more of a problem for others. But such a machine wouldn't play HD very well anyway even if the gma were well supported. It's unfortunate that there are people who buy netbooks fully expecting to play 1080p video properly (not that you did) but they're out there.
Anyway, there is absolutely no point trying to downgrade your 12.04 version.
