[mootzville]

Gnome comes stock with RHEL, so I'm not bothered to use other desktops as most of my time is spent in the terminal. I did get into some of the minimalist desktops at some point to see how little I could get away with. In that regard, OpenBox is pretty good, yet there are other more extreme minimalist desktops if you want.

Having said that, I have yet to have anything crash while running Gnome, but have had to limit a couple services provided by Gnome over time...sometimes -- maybe bugs in updates -- they can get resource hungry even while idle, but nothing beyond what an obsessive admin or power user might care about.