I finally found you Xfce and I am not going to let you go!
When I first installed Fedora 15 to try GNOME3 was fascinated by it’s look and differences from the older versions, I still like it but after a couple weeks using it started to work very slow and crashed many times, now finally decided to move to Xfce but not removing GNOME 3 because maybe one day I will come back but not until I upgrade my computer. Applications start very fast, don’t crash, it’s simpler and reminds me the ClearLooks of Gnome 2.6 from F13 and F14.
I moved to KDE, made everything classic also disabled the fancy effects, works really good kde 4.6 or 4.7 is very stable love it. The only thing that I don’t like in the XFCE version of Fedora is that it is classic (just like you like it) I am to lazy to tweak aroud themes.
I don’t like KDE and it’s Qt apps, One more reason for me to love Xfce is made with GTK+ same as GNOME which both use a lot of same libs and apps.
Other way for me. I like KDE.
But XFCE is also pretty good.
I did not try Fedora XFCE, but Mint XFCE (Debian based) is pretty good.
I tried KDE before but don’t like the style, Xfce reminds me Clearlooks and I have the speed and stability I want!
I’m running Gnome 3 on my Arch Linux machine, and I have to say I’m impressed with how lightweight and fast it is on my 7 years old pc, and how stable it is for a x.0 version. It consumes less RAM than my XFCE 4.8 desktop, has better default applications (gedit/mousepad, nautilus/thunar, gnome-terminal/xfce-terminal etc.). It has a very-very clean layout by default. It sure lacks some configurability options (which I think will come eventually without the need of 3rd party tweak tools) but the basic functionality is there and it’s solid-stable. The only thing that I find kind of useless is the ‘Applications’ button which presents you with dozens and dozens of apps icons. Everyone will simply use the search field, so a simple a-la-spotlight (mac os) approach would be better and cleaner.
I installed Xfce and kept GNOME 3 so I have all GNOME and Xfce apps on the current box. Xfce is way faster than GNOME 3 on F15 at me.
Gtk/Qt are just libraries – users don’t have to care about it. Just switch style if you don’t like the default one.
Well, maybe another reason could be that I don’t like Qt apps!
I keep getting logged out of xfce once I’ve gone idle and the screensaver shows. Has that happened to you?
Nope, when screensaver activates at me it doesn’t lock the screen and log out because I didn’t want like because at GNOME 3 when that happened my Network crashed for example when had torrents downloading after logging in the download always stopped. So I am staying like this.