I like XFCE for capturing the spirit of an era, and it’s still lightweight, so in that sense it’s excellent.

If I was more purely looking for something lightweight I think I’d end up with some other choice with a more modern design language.

Even thinking about this subject still makes me a little miffed about the “need” to constantly evolve look and feel of the UI.

Liquid Glass changed looks without innovating on functionality. It added bloat and confusion without providing any innovation to justify it. The whole system is so bad that I followed through on selling my Mac to go with a Linux laptop.

At least with modern KDE/Gnome you can make a user experience argument over XFCE for why you’d upgrade. Okay, it’s not as snappy and lightweight, but you get a lot of functionality out of it.

But these commercial operating systems are changing the UI to satisfy a marketing department rather than users. It has to look different or else there’s nothing new to sell.