It sounds like a sort of "best of both worlds" scenario...i'm interested in any suggestions. The last several years had me use more debian-centric distros (formerly Ubuntu, nowadays Mint). Is there a pair of DE+tiling WM setup that you suggest might be good? I'm open to recommendations!
For me XMonad+Gnome has worked pretty well. There's a nice PPA[1] that gives you most of what you need then you load the Gnome compatibility options[2] in XMonad config file and everything works. Well, there is one annoyance in that there's some sort of race condition and I have to restart xmonad after everything is up (alt-q by default) if I want windows to avoid the task bar like they should. But that only an extra second when I reboot.
