You can have those with a window manager too, but in this case you need to do more fiddling

I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.

I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.

[1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen