Good reads thanks to you, you are quite brave to not follow the GNOMEs. One thing that makes an DE (desktop environment) popular is how many people actually bother to change the default one.
For Ubuntu, default is GNOME DE. And GNOME devs talk a lot at conferences and are good at raking in the money. As for their coding skills, history speaks for itself. See GTK+ 2 above, use Ctrl+F to find occurences or paste text and filter for the words.
I know this is not news, but man you're really good at software dev. Just setup some pages for getting funding for your project, start from the ones that most common folks will use. A Pentium III is just a limiter for you now.
If only people would give the project a cash infusion of say 10 000 USD per month, most Ubuntu users in the world would have a less bleak OS in the future. Please people if you like good software, donate your money and hardware instead to super skilled developers.
Or you will have to keep quiet when it takes 8 gigabytes to run 2 simple apps and a web browser(with 3 tabs) on your raspberry pi in a dependable and safe manner. Or on your desktop, laptop, or smartphone. When it actually requires only 25% of those resources, according to the actual app resource requirements for Linux distribution.
Don't get me started on the UI blunders. Just put a decent help menu for your app in there, instead of complaining about noobish users. No one died of extra usage information for a particular app.
About saving XFCE DE, someone should request or help out with setting up the funding page for https://github.com/Xfce-Classic/libxfce4ui-nocsd , it seems close to dying without funds. And gordon's project, STLWRT I think.
Thanks to Wooloomooloo , saved me some time, I feel the same.
Huge thanks to the Squash for squashing poor quality software engineering, keep it up but get the funds first you ronin ( samurai). Saved me even more time. About 800 000 words is not exactly easy to type straight from the brain.
On behalf of many noobish users I asked, no specially crafted surveys(which get analyzed in a weird way) - GNOME sucks on touchscreens, like dust in your breakfast. So I don't know how to rationalize their position(GNOME devs) without seeming rude.
From intermediate users - X server is awesome. What even is Wayland good for other than another forced down your throat ostentatious "good thing" that makes only its developers feel good.
Like delusional people wrapping everyone in thick lead to protect from radiation. Except, to every normal person, they just harm the innocent people they claim to save or serve.