A good trick would be to...
Remove any heavy duty DE's like kde and gnome. Even xfce is not worth it.
Instead use something simple like lxde. You can use mate and razor but keep the install straightforward.
Look for other compositors like xcompmgr. You will have shadows and some window effects.
Otherwise if you intend to use kde, then just forget gnome and anything gtk based. Keep it alone and let kwin handle it.
What you'd get is something like #! but with your installed apps.
There was a time when an OS was built around a desktop environment. Nowadays they just patch it in. Besides opensuse
other kde distros are just alternatives.
KDE is OK if you have a lot of time and unlimited bandwidth. Personally i'd say forget it!
If you want compiz, then focus only on compiz and not the DE that will use it. Most times mate and lxde should work.... without taking a trip to hell.
xcompmgr is an extremely robust, dynamic and simple compositor. Take a look at it..
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xcompmgr
You can even build an OS with X windows running and patching in compiz and other desktop goodies to X directly and bypass the window-manager and DE completely. But that's a long way off... ....Something that Unity is sort of. Its a plugin for compiz...