I am currently trying to figure out which 'DE' I should use when I get Gentoo installed.

I'm wanting a 'DE' that doesn't use so much power up like Openbox but I want it to have some nice themes, a panel on the bottom (and maybe the top) and a desktop to place stuff on.

I'm looking for something that could be similar KDE but not power/memory consuming.

Plus might it be good to use KDE and openbox, or a mix of other 'WMs'?

{I'm not sure about Gnome but just like KDE I want it to not to be processor/memory hungry}

I'm just say'n but something alittle like Kubuntu KDE and Linux Mints panel and theme idea which is sort of like windows!

And I also wanting to use Compiz-Fusion to have a 3d Desktop as well (It's a plan, I'm not 100% sure about this yet)

Maybe try LXDE ?

FWIW, I'm running Fedora Rawhide with an LXDE desktop and compiz-fusion as the WM. Works for me.

Xfce or LXDE.

I'll go with Xfce.

Can I get similar look alikes of KDE themes with xfce or lxde?

(Plus I'm not sure lxde is stable under Gentoo)

Yes you can. Search gnome-look.org and kde-look.org for "oxygen".

It hasn't proven too difficult finding KDEish themes for IceWM and LXDE. LXDE in particular looks very nice, considering how light it is. KDE looks really nice but it's a huge waste of RAM.

I started with Slackware and KDE, but it bogged down my lappy so I just switched to XFce and WOW! It isn't as flashy looking as KDE, but it doesn't slow my system down. This is only day two with XFce so can't tell you much more, but so far I'm lovin' it.

The times I've tried LXDE, I've always felt it was still a work in progress. Xfce, on the other hand, is a viable alternative to Gnome and KDE. On both Fedora and Salix, Xfce uses slightly less memory and CPU time than Gnome, but there's not much in it. The distro always seems to be more important: Debian's Gnome was lighter than Fedora's Fluxbox! I've never used Gentoo, but I have tried Sabayon (which is based on Gentoo) and it was very nice with Xfce.

I can vouch for Fedora's LXDE being heavier than Debian's (and Ubuntus), even when installing a similar set of applications. For some reason (presumably deliberate), Fedora pulls in a lot more GNOME dependencies when installing GTK apps than do Debian and Ubuntu.

Are you sure its a matter with Fedora's GNOME? I've only used Fedora, and I think it starts up too many services by default. Once you stop ones you don't need, it should run just as fast as any other. I mean, obviously with unnecessary services like sendmail and avahi daemon, even fluxbox will run slower. There are only so many resources the system has to share with all running applications.

I myself prefer a taskbar on the bottom and a desktop with a menu and icons. But I only like GNOME, since it uses Gtk, which is used by all the programs I use (including Opera), and since it has become a little too fat these days, I have to turn off the nautilus desktop

By the way, has anyone looked into xpde and qvwm? Not very usable, but interesting projects nonetheless.

Opera can and will use Gtk libs to achieve and integrated look but it does not need them. Under KDE it will use Qt and other KDE libs instead or if you have neither it will use only its own toolkit.

As a side note, Opera will run slightly faster if you disable the use of Gtk libs.

By the way, how do you install extensions in opera? I clicked on "install" on opera's website but it gives me the option to save. There's no option to install.