Fluxbox
Bugs in KDE and Plasma had been getting on my nerves lately, so I thought about switching to something lighter like Fluxbox. A quick search gave me the impression that Fluxbox had the best (interpret that however you’d like) balance of configurability, resource use, and up-to-date-ness.
Theme: Dyne
xcompmgr provides basic compositing (fade in/out, shadows). Conky redraws the whole screen if I have background = yes in .conkyrc, so I have background = no and own_window = yes.
Editing various config files in ~/.fluxbox allows me to set shortcut keys and startup scripts, among many other things.
Since I can’t use the Powerdevil and NetworkManager plasmoids anymore, I installed wicd and kde-guidance-powermanager again. Added the appropriate commands to ~/.fluxbox/startup, and now they sit in my taskbar.
Starting nepomukserver on startup allows me to run krunner.