I require Compiz for organizational reasons; I make heavy use of its window sorting features. But I like light-weight environments so that I can give as much of my system's resources to the applications as possible.
Is there a DE that plays nice with Compiz, but is still very light?
I'm running Compiz standalone right now. Works just fine. I followed the instructions on the Arch Linux Compiz wiki page; see especially the section As a Standalone Window Manager.
Do you actually require a DE at all? I've run Compiz without one before, there's no real reason it would require one, and that's about as light-weight as you can get
