[skriticos2]

In fact I did that in the past weeks after being a bit weary of the Unity 8 situation. So I grabbed Debian testing and installed it. First I tried Gnome 3, then KDE and XFCE and boy, are they all ugly.

I started with Gnome 3.10 (after ignoring it for most of it's existence except once in the early time) and it failed to register simple mouse clicks in a Steam game (the firs thing I tried). It's also sluggish and ugly and hard to get anything productive done.

So I went to KDE 4.11 next. And it's as ugly as ever. The huge sound indicator at the bottom is just so ugly. And then they have what looks like a Start menu thingy to launch applications. Oh boy, that felt odd. Still miles better than Gnome 3, but nothing I'd like to see on a daily basis.

XFCE is just too bare-bone for me. It's OK in looks, but the task bars are just clumsy.

So I'm probably sticking to Ubuntu for the next LTS cycle too and see what comes of the Unity 8 desktop. Sad to see there are no real contenders.

[mdellabitta]

To my eye, XFCE in Xubuntu looks a lot better than in ootb Debian. Might want to give that a whirl.

Also you check out tint2, which is a nice 3rd party panel also used in Crunchbang.

[hootener]

Agree with you XFCE in Xubuntu. I just can't force myself to like Unity, stock Debian is ugly, and LXDE on Lubuntu looks flat out terrible on my 1080p monitors. Just a smeary blue and silver mess.

I don't think XFCE is perfect, but it ticks the important boxes for me. So much so that I just use it out of the box now rather than rolling my own from a vanilla OpenBox install (a fun exercise, btw).

[davidgerard]

Way better. Xubuntu have done a ton of prettifying. Wish they'd upstream this work.

[fit2rule]

xfce + kupfer = solution. Of course, you have to have a "Meta-Space <type first letters of app>" style of interaction mode, but I'm finding it quite an acceptable DE/Shell environment to replace the horrible, stinking mess of Unity.

[vizzah]

You can easily customize everything on the task bar and the task bar itself. I could neither stand the sizes/fonts/ugliness but after several days of tweaking it no longer looks like KDE at all and I am very happy with it :)