KDE's search, called KRunner, is pretty nice, too. It searches applications and files, mails and calendar entries etc. (if you use the KDE Kontact suite), can c

KDE's search, called KRunner, is pretty nice, too. It searches applications and files, mails and calendar entries etc. (if you use the KDE Kontact suite), can calculate things and convert between units, allows you to jump to windows that you have open and many more things. It's also got autocompletion and acts intelligently to a limited degree (basically it remembers that when you typed in "Fi" last time, you wanted Firefox, not Filezilla, so it puts Firefox at the top). Of course, this does use up more CPU cycles than the pretty basic search in Xfce. You can turn off some of those search features, if you don't think you'll need them. And here's some random examples of the features that KDE has: I do some webdev, so I need a color picker every now and then. I have one of those in my panel. I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads. Lastly, you might want to play around with turning off compositing in KDE's settings. That does limit some features, but should speed things up quite a bit, too.