I decided that in the end, even though I like Unity, I still prefer Xfce by a long shot. So I whipped up this desktop in about 30 minutes to satisfy my personal preferences. Thunar seems to be misbehaving for some reason, and takes ages to start up (it did that in Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16, too), so I decided to use ROX-Filer, a lightning-fast file manager that I first became acquainted with in Puppy Linux. Yay for Linux hackability!
Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop environment: Xfce4 Wallpaper: morning.jpg (part of the GNOME Shell default) Window manager: Metacity GTK+ theme: Adwaita (as usual, my choice in themes is about as interesting as a pile of rocks) Icon theme: GNOME Desktop icons: ROX-Filer (not Xfdesktop; Xfdesktop is linked to Thunar, which I have just said was misbehaving) Top and left panels: Xfce4 Panel Bottom panel: ROX-Filer session (rox-filer -S)