I've got XFCE installed but I'm working on learning RatPoison (a tiling window manager that doesn't use the mouse). It's a bit of a learning curve, so depending on what I'm working on, I switch between them (for now).

It's also a bit more of a pain to run multiple monitors with RatPoison and I've become well acquainted with reorganizing my screen configurations using the console commands to xrandr.

I also should have noted that I switched back to Xubuntu from Linux Mint.

I'm personally using a tiling window manager (StumpWM, in my case, but dwm & i3 are both nice too). It feels, in every way, like the future of desktop interaction. And it's a lot lighter-weight than the GNOME desktop.

Doesn't do as much, granted, but isn't that kinda the point?