Yep XFCE all the way for me too. Started my XFCE journey with Peppermint OS 7, 8, 9 and 10. Peppermint was a hybrid of LXDE and XFCE. It zoomed along faster than normal XFCE and because Mark Greaves was the man at the helm, who put it all together single handedly. He was a Linux Encyclopedia, knew everything about it inside out. Mostly memory, but like most of us he took a lot of notes too. When Mark Greaves passed away at the beginning of 2020, I, could not use Peppermint any more, simply because every single piece of Software he’d written into the OS, would just upset me further. So I was torn between grieving for Mark and letting Peppermint OS down, by going onto something else. It was the hardest decision ever for me to do, as I spent time through out my time with Peppermint, getting to know Mark, staying up with him till three or four in the morning answering people’s queries on Peppermint Forums.
Never met him in person, but just by chatting with him got to know him.
I went to Linux Mint XFCE Edition, but waited till April 2020. Found it so hard to let Peppermint go altogether. I then came up with the idea of making my own XFCE theme with Mark’s theme as a template, changed the colours around, to a nice dark grey, window border fades out when not highlighted. I then had to go on the hunt for a Icon theme, something light and fluffy to go with my theme? Sardi-Ghost-Flexible grey is the right Icon theme for my theme aptly named Smooth, as it has no Under-Shoot lines, like the default themes in Mint and a lot of other XFCE OSES do. I get as to why they are there, but in my experience after right clicking panel and the list does not look right, just keep right clicking till it does. Then reboot and you’ll see that it will display correctly all the time, so no need for Under-Shoot lines in themes.
I finally after making my own theme, was able to say goodbye to Peppermint OS, but take a little bit of Mark with me, which helps an awful lot. I moved to Linux Mint Ulyssa based on 20.04.1 the first point release. What I was noticing with it though, was icons being added wrong onto panel, through panel launcher, then all panels would disappear, when deleting apps off of panel. As Linux Mint went on releasing Uma and Una, the panel problems increased. To this day have not found the answer. So now I’m on Xubuntu 20.04, everything I chuck at it, it says yes to. It’s just like using Peppermint all over again, as everything I chucked at Peppermint it just kept saying yes I can do that. Love XFCE, have four panels Panel 0 with Whiskermenu, Panel 1 with time/date, Pulseaudio Plugin, Network Plugin, Panel 2 Docklike Plugin with all my apps on, Firefox, Nemo file manager, Synaptic, WhatsApp, Thunderbird, Kdenlive(AppImage), ClipGrab(AppImage), OBS-Studio, Spotify(Linux Mint’s version), VirtualBox, Xed, Audacity, Celluloid, Inkscape, GIMP and finally XFCE4-Terminal. Opened on a single click. A bit like in Cinnamon or KDE. My final panel, panel 3 has all my web Apps I have setup to open with Firefox. YouTube, Netflix, Disney, BBC i_player, ITV Hub, My4, My5, UKTV-Play, Amazon UK, It’s Foss Community, Gaming On Linux, World Of Solitaire, Proton DB, Jigsaw Planet. All panels are transparent and it’s this way to have my Desktop, that works for me.
Saves keep going into Whiskermenu all the time. Thunar I don’t like, because not enough options. Nemo has everything I need I even made a script for it to read Sha56 from downloaded Linux ISO’s with GTK-Hash, from a right click on said ISO.
