I've used kde for years, but earlier this year I decided to try xfce.

My goal was to have my own setup without "bloat" I never used. So my own task manager of choice, my search bar of choice, etc.

My initial impression of xfce was that it was much snappier than kde. My main gripe with xfce was the lack of wayland support.

A big personal issue; while my own custom setup was ok, I still had to maintain it, and I found myself trying to make xfce like kde. So might as well use kde I guess.

Another super specifc thing I missed was that its window manager didn't support defining horizontal gradients in the titlebar, so I couldn't rock a true windows classic theme. It could do vertical gradients, but that's not the same.

Now I'm back to using KDE.

I recommend that you try labwc. It's lean and supports Openbox themes.

I switched from X11 and LXDE to Sway and had a good experience. But Sway was my slippery slope to labwc.

https://github.com/labwc/labwc