Of all the desktop environments out there, I like XFCE the best.
It is solid, gets out of the way and doesn’t try to hide absolutely everything. It operates like a desktop environment should and not like some phone interface somehow incongruously grafted onto a desktop machine.
I also recently made the mistake of upgrading to WordPress 4.2 which completely changed how the “Press This” tool works. It now has most of its functionality removed, has been optimized for mobile usage and no longer has the features I need to post easily on Epicene Cyborg.
When will I learn? Since 2010 or so the rule has been: never upgrade anything.
I am unsure what I am going to do about my other site as what used to take me a few clicks now takes 10 to 100 times as long to do as it did before (from roughly 2-3 seconds to 20 seconds to 3-5 minutes depending on the complexity). I am not sure I will have time to maintain the site anymore due to the WordPress feature removals.
My partner and I were talking about this and she stated wisely that she was unsure of the wisdom of removing all features that power users depend on to make it simple enough that even your cat could post to your blog.
I don’t know either but designers (and wanna-be designers) seem intent on destroying anything useful. Removing features doesn’t make something easier to use. It just makes it useless.
I can no longer recommend WordPress as a blogging platform. It has been getting worse over the years and is now completely broken in most ways I care about.
Hating on WordPress is like hating on Firefox is like hating on the Democratic Party. They’re still the best, but they’re trending worse. So, you can no longer recommend WordPress as a blogging platform. Does that mean you recommend Blogger? There seems to be a new blogging platform called “Ghost,” but it looks even more slick than the new WordPress (it seems to be copying the style of the execrable medium.com).
But yeah, XFCE rocks. They have that floaty OSX-copycat icon bar at the bottom of the screen, but at least that “feature” is easy to turn off. You also might want to substitute Nautilus for the somewhat dumbed-down Thunar that is XFCE’s default file manager.