It seems somewhat contradictory. "many just want a launcher" and "because of Gnome’s size and decades of development, they can also have the ecosystem that DEs like LXDE and Xfce lack" seem contradictory to me. They want just a launcher, but they also want lots of DE specific stuff (presumably widgets and the like).

The hostile reception KDE 4 got was more because distros made it the default too early. Activities are an optional feature you need to configure.

If the article was correct I would have expected Cinnamon and Trinity to be a lot more popular.

> The hostile reception KDE 4 got was more because distros made it the default too early.

That's 100% on KDE.

> Activities are an optional feature you need to configure.

Except things that were possible without Activities before were cut in favor of activities.

> Except things that were possible without Activities before were cut in favor of activities.

What? I cannot recall anything I noticed myself.

Xfce is by far the most compatible and easiest to customize, not to mention light weight, both to mention also had decades of dev. And of just wanted a launcher they would've been happy with IceWM. People want stability, interoperability and effortless customizability, with good defaults. Esthetics, nice fonts and themes. Ice has those too, but not in a control panel as such, and rarely bundled.

Does XFCE still code the window border grab area inside the theme, and then ship greybird as the default theme with only a 1 pixel.

Awful OOB user experience. Can be made to work great, but full of papercuts for new users.

I have for many years helped set up some elderly folks for web access. Since they had less powerful PCs and were familiar with Windows, I used IceWM because it was light and I could make it look like Win98. That took a good deal of configuring, though. As their computers got better, I shifted to Xfce for several years, and have now moved to LXQt. I don't try very hard to make it look like Windows anymore, partly because Windows has become such a mess and partly because I have less energy. If I really wanted a system to look like Classic Windows, I would probably still use Xfce with the XFE tools.