While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency. It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a performance antipattern in the modern display server model.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.