I'll check this out, but I'm betting the bloat is still there. Nepomuk and its family are probably still required. I don't want or need it but it insists on running a MySQL server and piles of other daemons.

I used KDE from about 2000 to the end of 2010, then tried Awesome (too minimal for me, but interesting and FAST) and LXDE (no sessions?) before settling on Gnome. I don't love Gnome (and probably never will), but it works and I have reasonably fine-grained control over its bloatedness.

Read "The Art of Software Testing" by Glenford Myers. Even if you only get a few chapters in, you'll get a lot of ideas that will improve your testing. "Testing Computer Software" by Cem Kaner is another good one.