I know about gnome and kde.

Which one do you personally favor? Right now I'm on gnome by default.

IceWM rocks. Uses very little ram ,it is fast, and very simple to configure.

All of my Fkeys actually do something now.

I have never liked Gnome for some reason, don't know why but I prefer KDE. However, I do like IceWM and XFCE4 at the moment as these are very fast and don't take up as much RAM. However, aren't as easy as KDE (not saying they aren't easy). I guess I'm lazy hehe - I like nice looking GUI's because it's a priviledge if you have the resources to use the nicest looking one's (don't get me wrong, I'm not affraid to use CLI's, I actually spend most my time and a shell)

All the preferences and menus in IceWM can be modified by simply chamging a few text files.

The one thing I missed from KDE was the alt+F2 combo popping up the application launcher.

That is until I found :GRun is an advanced application launcher written in C and GTK. It is even better,
gRun, an advanced application launcher written in C and using GTK for the interface. gRun includes features such as a history, command completion from the history and from PATH, recognition of console mode applications and launching a terminal for them, file extension associations and a dual fork()/execvp() application launcher.

Set it up as my F6 key and now I can launch any app.

I think the coolest thing is that you can turn apps in the taskbar into icons in the systray so they take up less space.