I have been using XFCE, but I'm in the process of switching.
I think they project is going to die in the future, not necessarily in an abandonment sense, but it will severely lag behind, due to lack of resources (I also think the developers behind it are not really good).
Thunar (the file manager) had, for around an year, a bug where around 20% of the time, moving/deleting a file would cause a crash - this was in fact marked as critical.
There have been some clumsy attempts to fix it, until the fix came out after a long time.
Thunar is also, mysteriously, for several reasons, an enemy of keyboard users (try to use it this way, and you'll understand).
It's not realistic to switch file manager, as there is a disconnection in the desktop usage workflows, and unfortunately, the file manager is a core part of a DE.
Of course, not everybody has such requirements from a file manager/DE, so it may be a good choice for many, although it's not really true that all the other Ubuntu distros are so disruptive, in particular, at least a comparable one isn't (and I suspect there are more than one).
I think they project is going to die in the future, not necessarily in an abandonment sense, but it will severely lag behind, due to lack of resources (I also think the developers behind it are not really good).
Thunar (the file manager) had, for around an year, a bug where around 20% of the time, moving/deleting a file would cause a crash - this was in fact marked as critical. There have been some clumsy attempts to fix it, until the fix came out after a long time.
Thunar is also, mysteriously, for several reasons, an enemy of keyboard users (try to use it this way, and you'll understand).
It's not realistic to switch file manager, as there is a disconnection in the desktop usage workflows, and unfortunately, the file manager is a core part of a DE.
Of course, not everybody has such requirements from a file manager/DE, so it may be a good choice for many, although it's not really true that all the other Ubuntu distros are so disruptive, in particular, at least a comparable one isn't (and I suspect there are more than one).