Thanks Didier but I really don't care for Gnome. The reason I like Xfce is that it can load fairly full KDE support immediately. The biggest reason for that is that I'm really old school in that I spend a lot of time in File Managers and Konqueror, Krusader, Dolphin are the type I like, probably because I started with the ancient PCTools PCShell. I have never liked Xfce's or any I've seen in any Gnome derivative and for me that is a deal breaker.

It would be interesting to see if I can reproduce the same conflicts. What problems did you run into?

As to the wallpaper :) , it is suppose to be a photo taken somewhere in Yosemite National Park, but if I didn't know that, I would have bet the farm I've stood in that exact same spot many times over the years during trout season. That "spot" is along a fork of the Stanislaus River in a valley north of Yosemite.

The bulk of conflicts I experience is due to employing KWin. Several of XFce's "Settings" tools won't even launch which may be a good thing in the longview but it is a bit confusing which set of "Settings" to use for a specific job or effect since they overlap quite a bit. If there was a major difference in performance I might be able to accept that extra effort but since there is now so little, it just isn't worth it to me. I'm not at all in love with Plasmoids and it would be nice to have a little more understanding of exactly which parts of Akonadi I really need but what little tweaking I've done results in a Desktop at rest of about 3% CPU and 6% RAM with KDE 4 and Plasma 5 flavors I've tried get that with no interference from me. So I'm guessing KDE has been listening and responding.

Meh. I run Cinnamon (with a lot of GNOME programs) and at complete rest it bounces between 0% and 1.3% on the CPU according to htop, it is a little heavy on the RAM @ ~900MB but I have a large host file (724,000+ entries) and a large firewall blocklist (63,000 entries). I don't have to tweak anything. That's on a '07 C2E X9000 @ 2.8GHz & 4GB RAM.

I've not used KWin with Xfce, but I have noticed KDE-4 picks up a few of the Xfce settings when I move to KDE and don't first 'turn off' the Xfce Application Autostart "switches." The few I've seen KDE "pull in" from Xfce are Xscreensaver, Clipman and a start up audio script.
OTOH, Xfce never "pulls in" anything from KDE.
There was a time when kde did consume a great deal more resources than Xfce, but you are correct, that hasn't been the case for several years. I use to track it and write it down and the results were very close between Xfce and kde-4. That said, regardless of what the various utilities report, Xfce does launch applications notably faster than KDE.
The leather-dark theme is so pleasing to my eyes, I've stopped using KDE almost entirely and plan not to install kde-5 when Slackware makes the change.
If you are not indexing your hard drive and/or using KMail/Pim, you don't need akonadi. One of the first thing I do with each fresh installation is uninstall akonadi, but "removepkg" does not, for whatever reason, remove the executable files and you have to go into /usr/bin and delete them manually.
;)

Well... this has all changed with kde5.
Installing kde5 is akin to unexpectedly finding yourself walking on the beach in your street clothes and a week later you are still trying to get the sand out of your shoes. :)

I tried kde5 on 19 February. I remember the date as that is the date on the numerous bits and pieces I still find scattered all over my hard drive. I had forgotten, unfortunately, why I had deleted kde5 and installed it again this morning.
Kde5 totally screwed up my Xfce setup. It changed the colors of the themes I was using for Appearance and the Windows Manager. It added 13 options to the Xfce Application Autostart panel and keyboard control of the volume has ceased to function.
Of course, this didn't improve my opinion of kde5. :)
Rather than spend the next several weeks cleaning the "sand" out of my hard drive, I think I'll just do a fresh install of -current.
:)

Current with Openbox.

I added some screenshots I took from various desktops in an article I wrote about Slackware, though I must confess, a few of the screenshots are *deliberately* ugly...

http://devio.us/~dan/blog/2018/slackware_desktop.html

(the screenshots are towards the end)

Slackware often makes me think of Scandinavia [I was in Norway when I first heard about it]. To that end...

forgot about this one in my desktop image rotation folder, recently popped up

I do not miss M$ at all!

Really nice, I like the look of that.

As part of my work I went to some first aid training yesterday. At one point the trainer had to stop the presentation since W10 threw a pop-up onto the screen about having to restart because of updates. But being W10 it said it in a happy-go-lucky but patronising way: "let's cross this one off your list: you need to reboot because of updates :)" or something to that effect.

I can't remember Linux ever asking me to do this. Unless you look carefully at the verbose text in e.g. upgrading point releases in Debian, you may miss the following text:

But it flies past so quick that you'd hardly know it was there.

Still using Awesome window manager, changed the colours recently and very happy with this

That most likely was for a major update, like Fall Creators Update (Windows 10 version 1709). There were actually three options, Restart, Pick a Time, or Remind Me Tomorrow. Seems reasonable to me.

Where I work they seem to have implemented their own update policy on our Windows machines (which I thankfully don't have to use much, but anyway). Yesterday someone was giving a presentation and it forced him to reboot in the middle of it. Actually, he could delay it, but only for 30 minutes and then the reboot was forced. Granted, that's probably not really Windows' fault but rather our dumb IT policies.