When comparing Sakura vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends Sakura for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” Sakura is ranked 15th while cool-retro-term is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Sakura is:
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Pro True colour support
Supports full 24-bit color.
Pro Great unicode support
Even shows combining chars correctly.
Pro Starts quickly even on lower-end machines
Sakura's quick start-up time becomes noticeable with lower-end machine's such as Eeepc 1015PX (Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM).
Pro Tab support
Pro Easy zoom
Sakura supports zooming through keyboard keys (Ctrl+'+' to zoom in and Ctrl+'-' to zoom out).
Pro Mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens
Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.
Pro Available in multiple repositories
This terminal is available for download from repositories in all the most popular distros, making it easily available.
Pro Good rendering
If you disable every special effect and the framing, the rendering is actually quite comfortable and readable making a good terminal option if you have CPU cycles to spare.
Cons
Con Doesn't provide many configuration options
Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities.
Con Large dependency on kde
It looks like many of the effects present here are provided by more or less stock kde effect libraries. For Gnome-based systems, installing this will pull in a large handful of kde libs.
Con Extremely heavy and impactful on resources
A massive amount of resources are used as graphical processing in cool-retro-term. They are ridiculously heavy for the terminal's intended use.
Con Not very practical by today's standards
While it certainly has an aesthetic feel, cool-retro-term is nothing more than a cool trick if you want to play around. It's not very useful in this day and age.