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Xfce is way too minimal to be great. An great DE must be written mostly in JavaScript and hoard gigabytes of memory in order to render a single window.
Hardly GB. You don't have to lie to make a point.
Loved XFCE but it's borderline unusable with high DPI monitors and dual monitor setups that aren't the same.
I very recently upgraded from a dual fullhd to a dual 4k setup and I was genuinely surprised how little problems I had setting everything up to the high DPI displays. I am genuinely interested in hearing what pitfalls might still await me.
I really wanted to like XFCE, but the tiny tiny window grab area for resizing is just too damn frustrating.
You can configure a window resize hotkey. I use Win+(drag the window with right mouse) and it resizes it i the way you expect, moving the corner closest to the cursor. Left click would move the window instead of resizing. This is by far my favorite way to resize and I don't know why it's not an industry standard.
I use this so much once I found it, this solved my frustration with the tiny resize border on the window itself.
This setting can be found in Settings > Window Manager Tweaks > Accessibility > Key used to grab and move windows: Alt
Loved XFCE but it's borderline unusable with high DPI monitors and dual monitor setups that aren't the same.
Xfce is way too minimal to be great. An great DE must be written mostly in JavaScript and hoard gigabytes of memory in order to render a single window.
If I understand the target of your snark, Gnome shell on my machine uses 172MB of RAM, if I sum all other gnome-related stuff (gdm-wayland-session, gjs, gnome-session-service, etc), it's 200MB. Hardly GB. You don't have to lie to make a point.
I love the idea of a minimal desktop environment, but I've never tried XFCE. Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier? I find the screenshots on their homepage very intuitive but a bit ugly.
> Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier? You're probably not the target audience then. It's not a DE that prioritizes prettiness. If you want something that looks like the 90's desktop metaphor, it's exactly that and it's really good at that.
xfce way back in the day was trying to clone CDE which is open source and actively maintained these days https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (really. last release was in november 2025) Just in case you want an even more vintage experience. There's also people trying to keep the SGI experience alive, but this one is a clone: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ As for as early xfce check out https://xteddy.org/…
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
I won't consider XFCE vintage but sane, boring but working. Vintage would be a vanilla FVWM, or MWM, or TWM/CTWM. But not so much, as things come full circle.
EvilWM would look outdated and crappy under Slashdot threads in 2001 or close, because it looked something from the 80's, altough some bright users stated that it saved tons of RAM for applications.
Its clone CWM nowadays it's highly praised by OpenBSD users as a no-bullshit, floating-no tiling madness window manager (and by me too). It works, it can work without any mouse for every window action (even resizing), it doesn't need dmenu, you can use virtual desktops and search between opened windows with autocompletion. So, forget about RSI's, your hands can literally rest.
Xfce has long been the only DE that gets out of my way enough for me to actually be productive instead of excited by the possibility of different configurations.
Desktop Zoom (Xubuntu/Kubuntu): In Xfce (Xubuntu) and KDE (Kubuntu), Alt + Scroll is the default shortcut to zoom in and out of the entire desktop. This is an accessibility feature used to magnify specific parts of the screen.