I’ve never used an OS with Xfce as the desktop environment. So I installed KateOS 3.6 for the heck of it. The rest of this post contains a bunch of screenshots to give you an idea of what the desktop is like.
One of the excellent benefits of KateOS and Xfce is that neither requires very powerful hardware to run on. If you have an old PC lying around collecting dust, you might want to give KateOS a shot.
Thunar File Manager | Thunar home page
Ross, I’m surprised that you’ve never used XFCE with a Linux Distro before as I’ve seen many guides based on Ubuntu on here before.
Ubuntu has the ability to use pretty much any DE (Desktop Environment, but typically it supports the big 3 DEs in Gnome, KDE and XFCE (Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu) You can easily install any of those either through the command line (sudo apt-get FLAVOR_NAME-desktop), where flavor name is kubuntu, ubuntu or xubuntu, or a package manager like Synaptic and do a search on those names.
I hope this help some. If you couldn’t tell, Ubuntu is my favorite Linux Distro. =P
P.S. Thunar rocks
@Sal G.:
I’ve used WindowMaker (which I think still may be my favorite), FVWM, AfterStep, Enlightenment and Fluxbox (and Gnome and KDE of course) – but up until a couple days ago, I’d never tried out XFCE. I prefer the ‘light’ ones over Gnome and KDE. With that said, some of the stuff that compiz-fusion can do is really amazing.