I see the word "new" used in the article quite a bit. How new is new? Fedora Linux 15 was the first distro that made systemd default and it came out 10 years ago (in a few days from now). RHEL 7 made it the default as did Debian 8 and up, and Ubuntu LTS 16.04 and up. Of course systemd does add new features often.
Regarding binary logs vs. text ones... you do NOT have to run systemd in persistent mode and you can run your preferred more traditional logging system if you want. Hey, that's what RHEL7 and 8 have been doing by default. I myself prefer the binary log and haven't run into any "catastrophic failure" over the years I've been using it. If losing your logs would be a catatrophic failure, they can be exported in various text-based formats if desired... and backups... and no, systemd isn't one big binary that does everything. There are dozens and dozens of binaries.
Gayan, I'm pretty sure XFCE is still alive and well, although it does occasionally have lulls in development. It was ported to GTK3 a release or two ago. Perhaps you are confusing XFCE with LXDE which is somewhat retired in preference of LXQT.
I'd recommend removing the standard applications menu and replacing it with the whisker menu which is offered as a separate package. On Fedora the package name is xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin but it may vary depending on which distro you use. Xubuntu uses the whisker menu by default.
I believe there can be a search service for XFCE and search services (that crawl the filesystem and make a metadata database) can often be the CPU/RAM hogging thing on any desktop environment. If I ever find those going, I turn them off immediately AND remove the distro packages that provide the search function if doing so doesn't take out more than you want because of dependencies.
I also use KDE Plasma on some systems and I haven't really had any issues with it... but granted I don't use all of the KDE applications (no kmail or PIM program usage) and I also turn off their file indexing / searching service.
It is worth noting that you can also look at XFCE's startup services and disable any of them you don't want/use. They have a widget for that in their system settings area.
Authored Comments
I see the word "new" used in the article quite a bit. How new is new? Fedora Linux 15 was the first distro that made systemd default and it came out 10 years ago (in a few days from now). RHEL 7 made it the default as did Debian 8 and up, and Ubuntu LTS 16.04 and up. Of course systemd does add new features often.
Regarding binary logs vs. text ones... you do NOT have to run systemd in persistent mode and you can run your preferred more traditional logging system if you want. Hey, that's what RHEL7 and 8 have been doing by default. I myself prefer the binary log and haven't run into any "catastrophic failure" over the years I've been using it. If losing your logs would be a catatrophic failure, they can be exported in various text-based formats if desired... and backups... and no, systemd isn't one big binary that does everything. There are dozens and dozens of binaries.
I assume you all switched to Devuan? No?
Gayan, I'm pretty sure XFCE is still alive and well, although it does occasionally have lulls in development. It was ported to GTK3 a release or two ago. Perhaps you are confusing XFCE with LXDE which is somewhat retired in preference of LXQT.
I'd recommend removing the standard applications menu and replacing it with the whisker menu which is offered as a separate package. On Fedora the package name is xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin but it may vary depending on which distro you use. Xubuntu uses the whisker menu by default.
I believe there can be a search service for XFCE and search services (that crawl the filesystem and make a metadata database) can often be the CPU/RAM hogging thing on any desktop environment. If I ever find those going, I turn them off immediately AND remove the distro packages that provide the search function if doing so doesn't take out more than you want because of dependencies.
I also use KDE Plasma on some systems and I haven't really had any issues with it... but granted I don't use all of the KDE applications (no kmail or PIM program usage) and I also turn off their file indexing / searching service.
It is worth noting that you can also look at XFCE's startup services and disable any of them you don't want/use. They have a widget for that in their system settings area.