After years of using Gnome 3/4 with a modified setup on Debian, I returned to Xfce, and am quite impressed by the state of Xfce 4.18.
My background: Using Linux since 1998 or so (yes, I am old) as my main OS, I used a lot of different window mangers and DEs.
Gnome 3 actually never really matched my personal workflows, but I always discovered many paper cuts using other desktop environments and thanks to dconf at least I could automatically configure Gnome 3 in a way which made it usable for me.
For life reasons I needed a cheap, small sub notebook (or netbook, as it was called when I was younger), and settled on the HP Stream 11 with an N4120. No way to run Gnome on this machine and work fluently, so I recalled that Xfce was at the sweet spot between being full featured, fast and light on memory. (+stable and Gtk+ based, KDE hasn't been an option for me since 3.5 and I check it regularly.)
I got more than I bargained for, Xfce felt so quick, responsive, good and simply sane that I run it now on every Linux desktop/laptop I own. (But my entertainment system, which I only use for Netflix.)
What I really like about Xfce 4.18:
- Speed and responsiveness, even on my beefy machine I feel the difference
- Sane size of titlebars etc.
- Customizable panels out of the box and xfce4-panel-profiles for 1 click setups
- Thunars split view. I get tired by the Gnome developers, who removed this feature from Nautilus, explain that two Nautilus windows side by side are equivalent to a split view. It is not
- Ansible support for xfconf out of the box to automate the deployment of my configuration
- Light on RAM: Around 400 MB vs a little above 1 G for Gnome
- Everything I need for my DE is included, no search for plugins which might or might not fix my problems
- Useful and fast default applications (Thunar, Mousepad, Parole...)
- After tweaking the hotkeys/shortcuts a little bit a perfect keyboard driven experience
So far the only 'downsides' I have with Xfce 4.18 is the lack of Wayland support (AFAIK coming with 4.20), the Terminal does not resize the text area if you add new tabs (easily fixed by configuring it to always show the tab bar in the terminalrc) and the type-ahead launchers (whisker-menu, xfce4-appfinder) are 'weaker' than the type-ahead launchers in Gnome/KDE.
Big shout out to the Xfce developers for this excellent desktop environment!
tl;dr: If you haven't used Xfce for some time, give Xfce 4.18 or later a try, you might like it.
Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.
People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
I want maximum performance: LXDE
I want something that looks good and I don't want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon
Xfce isn't on this list! It's not the best at anything. But it's pretty good at everything. It's an overall best (in my opinion) but because it's not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I've tried all of the DE's listed above, but I'm the crazy guy: that's a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?
If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.
I would Xfce give the first position on usability and 'bang for the buck'. ;-)
Still, it for sure doesn't help that the big distributions default to Gnome mostly.