Focus follows mouse is buggy in 14.04 Xubuntu. There's no fast user switch (you can lock the screen and switch as a good-enough workaround). Suspend and restart causes the screen to not restore on occasions. Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3). As you say the default theme is not great, I didn't like that focused and unfocused windows looked pretty much the same.

I don't know if it is better than gnome2 was but it pisses all over anything gnome3. The xfce panel is better and easier to tweak than the gnome equivalent (e.g adding a new item does not require finding a gap on the panel to right click), the places panel shortcut is really handy, xfce-terminal seems faster and less resource hungry when scrolling text than gnome-terminal, and I like the whisker menu. I just wish they had gone with the solid Xfce 4.10 for the LTS instead of the beta 4.11.

> Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3).

But there is no need to use Thunar, just install Nautilus and add a launch button for it into the panel.

...unless you're a heavy user of files on the desktop. But I think it's possible to configure an alternative file manager to manage those, too.

Care to share us your arrangement? Perhaps we can ask them to change the defaults?

How does XFDE how HiDPI? I'm using Gnome 3 now primarily because its the only DE that handles HiDPI well by default.

There is Settings / Appearance / Fonts / Custom DPI setting, which takes care of most of things. Panel width is also set in pixels, so you also need to widen the panels.

Firefox does not obey the above DPI setting, so also set about:config / layout.css.devPixelsPerPx separately. Yet this doesn't seem to affect video controls in YouTube, so they are kind of tiny.

Finally, nothing above scales the window title bars. I kind of like the title bars thinner, because they are wasted space anyway. But if you wanted to increase their height, apparently you'd need to edit the png files in the window theme files, because Xfce does not attempt to scale them, but uses them as pixel graphics.

>It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated.

I used to run exclusively Linux distros, but then switched to OS X around 2008. Recently, I installed the Xubuntu Desktop and I felt that dated feeling you write about. My thought was, "Wow this hasn't changed" Even if it has changed, I couldn't tell at a glance. That's good in one way, but bad in a lot of others.

I don't think the default Xubuntu theme has ever changed. Which is kind of a shame, but also kind of good. It's very consistent and makes some users who don't care about eye candy and hate change happy, but it scares off some newer users who have a strong association with old-looking meaning poor-functioning.

Given how many awesome XFCE themes there are out there, I'm surprised Xubuntu hasn't moved to something nicer looking.