I did like XFCE at one point, but it never really did quite nail the UX for me. A lot of the problem is more on GTK+2 than it was anything else. (Obligatory mention of no thumbnails in file dialog; I used to patch GTK by hand for this!) Now with newer versions of GTK, this problem has unfortunately gotten worse for me, and I don't really prefer XFCE very much. Worseyet, I've gotten used to wlroots giving me good support for things that never really worked well in X11, and XFCE's plan regarding X11 and Wayland going into the future is still somewhat unclear.
I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance.
Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe.
