galaxy-desktop

Quick hack that mixes-and-matches components from various desktop environments.

Be warned: Most likely you do not want to use this.

Why?

For most of it, I like the UX of GNOME. But GNOME Shell feels slooooow: response/latency to input is “meh” at best, and memory usage is... well, let's say that in retrospective using JavaScript might not have been a great idea.
Budgie demostrated that libmutter can be put to use to write a fast compositor. Unfortunately it will stop using GTK+ and GNOME components in version 11, and anything that doesn't use GTK+ 3.x is more or less broken when using a HiDPI display.
At some point I tried the Pantheon shell, which ships with Elementary. While quite neat inside Elementary, when using their own applications and GTK+ theme modern GTK+/GNOME applications will have visual glitches with most third-party themes, and even with the default Adwaita theme. Wingpanel and Switchboard were crashing very often, and many things wouldn't work (which I blame on trying things on Arch Linux instead of going full Elementary).
Some of Pantheon's components are quite self-contained, and run happily without the rest of the DE. Prime examples are the Gala compositor and the Plank panel.

The following are needed at runtime:

Additionally, I tend to use the following as well:

Many GNOME core applications: Nautilus, Epiphany, Eog...
Termite, which can do many things with the keyboard.
Synapse. While ULauncher looks sleeker and is better maintained, it takes more than double the amoun of memory compared to Synapse.
The Pantheon Screenshot tool.

This frankendesktop is quite rough on the edges, and there are a few shortcomings you may want to be aware of — this is not just for anybody!

No UI for configuration. dconf-editor is your friend, or even using gsettings in the command line if that's how you roll.
No panel with application menus. I'm currently shopping for one, budgie-panel kinda works but I would like something simple which can autohide, show tasks for the current desktop, have an area for status icons, clock/calendar, and has an applications menu. Bonus points if it can take the applications menus using D-Bus and display them.