Article on Xfce in LWN

[Oblio]

"While the 4.4 release will be a big step in that direction, the Xfce
project will still face the challenge of achieving parity with Gnome
and KDE on the efforts of a developer community a fraction of the
size."

Nice article. But I can't really say I agree with you. Xfce is doing
the smart thing, partly because of the lack of developer: it is
focusing on the desktop itself.
Both Gnome and KDE have huge armies of devs, but those are working on
those integrated apps, which are, for the most part, redundant apps.
Few of them reach the level of independent projects (for example Krita
vs Gimp, KOffice vs OpenOffice, Kvirc vs Xchat, ...).

Xfce doesn't need as many developers, because it already has those
apps - just think of all the good, independently developed GTK2
applications. I can run Gimp as well in Xfce as I do in Gnome (and
it's just an example).