i've actually gone back to gnome temporarily. (forgive me xfce, for i have shamed you!
)
what i think would be ideal is xfce on either an arch or gentoo setup, but i'll wait around until the next release of xfce. currently xfce comes with xffm, which i must say, is god awful; however, i've heard rumblings that thunar will actually become a part of xfce in the next release?? so until then i'll be using gnome and xfce (xubuntu-desktop) back and forth on my ubuntu install. thunar is still a masked package in portage, and i can't remember if arch has a thunar package.
and dream linux looks sorta interesting. i'll investigate more later when, hopefully, it doesn't take ages for images to load from their server. fuck!