- Edited
brent 1) When are you saying goodbye to Plasma?
Never.
2) Am I the only one who finds the bicycles romantic?
Yes, but for the rest of us, it's very easy to get rid of them.
3) My biggest knock on all the XFCEs I've tried is there were far too many settings managers or setting never being unified but scattered like Mate. Still the case here?
Somewhat. But the main settings are available in a GUI settings manager.
4) with the workplace switcher it's a busy beaver of duplicate icons on the task bar. is there a way around that?
If you mean the worspace switcher plus the icon-only task manager, you could always simply remove the task manager. But that means you'd always need to go to the menu to fetch anything you want to run that's not in the workspace switcher
And that's not the end of the world, either. I definitely wouldn't get rid of the workspace switcher, because that's extremely useful. Those applications are all running on an uncluttered desktop of their own, without competing with any other application. That's huge. Neither the task manager or a dock provides that functionality.
I might be tempted to get rid of the task manager if I install a dock - those two provide the same functionality. But I'm not sure how well a dock would work with a bottom panel. Maybe that's not a problem. If it turns out to be one, I could always change the bottom panel to a top panel, like what I use with Plasma.