About 2 months ago, I accidentally broke my KDE install and decided to try XFCE. And it’s actually fantastic. The default theme isn’t ugly, but it’s definitely not winning any awards. However, after installing it took me less than ~10 minutes to change the theme, and figure out how to arrange the panel to be perfect. XFCE ships with both a panel and a dash. I was going to remove the dash because they normally seem clunky to me, but then I thought, “I’ll do it later when it gets in my way”. And it never got in my way. Heck, I even use it sometimes.

Unlike on my educator-issued Windows 11 laptop where I’m making hourly trips to the settings menu, for the last 2 months I’ve been trying Xfce I have never touched a single setting (well, except for the Wi-Fi menu). It’s snappy, responsive, and it does everything my KDE install did three times as fast. All the default apps just work. I don’t have to think about anything other than my apps (unlike gnome) and as much I like KDE, this is just faster, even on my decently powerful computer.

One note about XFCE that most people won’t like is that it’s missing a proper search bar in its application launcher menu. I already know the commands to open my apps, so this is a non issue for me. XFCE is probably the desktop environment I would recommend. KDE is amazing but has many faults, Gnome kinda sucks, but I have nothing too bad to say about XFCE.