A further comment on Enlightenment. It is one of the desktops that can work in
conjunction with Gnome, XFCE or KDE. In other words, you can start Enlightenment
from inside other desktops or it will give you an option in the sessions to use
Gnome with Enlightenment, giving you a combined environment.

I don't know enough to understand how it works, but it can become confusing to
have mixed environments and can produce unexpected results. For example, if you
run Nautilus inside XFCE, you lose the XFCE desktop, but still have the menu bar
for XFCE. When you right click on the desktop you get Gnome options and not
XFCE's. When you close Nautilus you don't get XFCE's desktop back unless you
kill Nautilus in the Process Manager. Just thought I should point that out to
anybody using alternate desktops and wanting to run Gnome apps such as Nautilus.
This also happens when you run Nautilus in Enlightenment or Enlightenment in
XFCE. It is better to use Thunar and stick with one desktop until you are
familiar with how the desktop manager works. Then you can experiment with mixed
environments.