[dagelf]

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.

[wrp]

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.

[happymellon]

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.