DE require tremendous overhead of serv/daemons just to be able to make shortcuts/menu items clickable, I would never use such contraptions on my system.
I use a wm and have no use for polkit, dbus, logind, automount, obfuscated rights elevations and demotions, .... all this crap that unnecessarily must run for the sake of aesthetics and MS-win utility.
If I needed icons on my background I would use just a light filemanager, like pcmanfm, but I don't.