I also like xfce. I like the fact that it is lightweight, and fast.
Quark and a CAD program. If I found substitutes for those I think I would not use Windows at all.
That the reason I run a VM. Not those two programs, but, like you, there are a couple of things that won't quite run under Linux yet.
Have never run VM but years ago ran DOS emulators. That was not so useful.
I have looked at Scribus as a replacement for Quark, it is scriptable in Python. I currently use Quark and Xdata to publish a 3000 page (plus indexes) distribution catalog, we have recently considered a database driven catalog approach. That is not in place yet.
Even in the Windows environment I use a lot of Open Source Apps. daily. Firefox (almost never use IE), Gimp (prefer it to Photoshop because it is not so resource intensive), Gnumeric (when I need to do regular expression replacements in a spreadsheet), Notepad++ (favorite windows editor), a bulk rename utility, Image Magick (to batch process images for the website), and Scribus when I need to create a .pdf from a image file. There are others I use, but those are the ones I use almost daily.
Best regards,
Texas Fossil