Great news! XFCE still is my favorite desktop environment on normal PCs for being the right balance between features and snappiness, although I tend to use rox-

Great news! XFCE still is my favorite desktop environment on normal PCs for being the right balance between features and snappiness, although I tend to use rox-filer rather than Thunar for operations on most used directories for it being faster than Thunar (although Thunar did improve a lot). To do so I keep those 4 or 5 icons on the panel each of which calls rox-filer and one of the paths as the argument (example: "rox-filer Documents" as command with "~/Documents" as working directory). This makes it much faster especially with crowded dirs.