I managed a couple of months. There were niggles and issues, but I gritted my teeth and bore with it until one day, I snapped. It was a trivial issue, really: Gnome-screensaver was conflicting in an odd way with xscreensaver, and I wound up unable to change any of my screensaver settings. Which was annoying, because the screen kept locking me out. So in what might be considered a slight over-reaction to a malfunctioning screensaver, I sacrificed an hour of productivity and wrote my own GUI.