I love XFCE. My OS is Fedora, though. I never even install Gnome or KDE.
I started using XFCE when Redhat 5 came out. It was not part of the package, but I was so disappointed with the bloat at the time that I looked for something lighter. Downloaded XFCE and installed it. Never looked back.
There are other very light GUI’s but XFCE is Gnome compliant and works for me.