Desktop hopping, and settling on fluxbox....for now.
So next i tried lxqt. It is nice and light also, even lighter than xfce. lxqt is a merger of lxde and a DE called razor-qt. It threw bugs when I used it. I couldnt put certain programs on the deskbar.
I then tried lxde, which had some annoying dialog box throwing an error, "could not connect, No such file" or something or other. when I looked it up it turned out that other people had this problem, but it required a lot of digging around and hoping that ht eproblem would go away by messing with various dbus configs etc.
At this point, having installed three different desktop environments, I realized that I have loads of crap on my computer now. Different terminal emulators, loads of file managers, file indexers, image viewers, and other stuff I don't ever know about let alone need. I really began to miss my simple i3 install. Of course its still there. All I need to do is modify the exec statement in my .xinitrc file to launch i3 again.
It was then that installed fluxbox. Straight away I liked it. There is nothing there! I don't know how it works, its that minimal. Void Linux had fluxbox in its repositories, as well as a tool called 'fbmenugen'. Im really looking forward to messing with it. There will be further posts on this I'm sure :-)