>>1434098I don't really understand what do you mean by "losing speed", just remove/optimize things right to get more minimalistic outcome. You know Mint is also based on Ubuntu. I don't know any distribution where you can modify things _that_ easily because everything works almost in the same way. If you are interested in supported applications etc. with Wine, go to winehq's database to check playable games.
Gentoo, Slackware, LFS, Crux or Arch are my suggestions but they are for advanced users.
I have achieved this with my old Intel E5200 @ 2.50GHz and Caviar Blue 500GB HDD:
systemd-analyze && systemd-analyze blame: Startup finished in 2078ms (kernel) + 3768ms (userspace) = 5847ms