[dicytea]

By DE, I'm mostly talking about having a cohesive graphical shell, not the random apps that comes pre-installed (who cares about those?).

The login manager, lock screen, taskbar, notification daemon, launcher, OSD, workspace overview, etc. In WMs (or WM-like compositors), you either have to cobble all of this together yourself or just give up and convince yourself that you're a minimalist.

Doing this kind of stuff was fun for a while, but these days I'm starting to crave for something actually good and polished.