I just took XUbuntu for a spin. It's just as great as the 13.10 release. If you're a GNOME refugee and looking for an excellent desktop then I can't recommend XUbuntu enough.
I recently moved to xfce on Ubuntu as well. I felt like it's much more "by hackers for hackers" than the Ubuntu or Gnome UI stuff. For instance, I can have my 10 virtual workspaces, and focus follows mouse and all the other things I've gotten used to having over the past 15+ years.
I'm having weird issues with Gnome-Do, sometimes it just won't show up. It will run, but it won't show up, and killing it and relaunching it doesn't do anything. I think the hotkey just bugs out sometimes, and I have to relog for it to work. Weird.
Alternatives: kupfer (in the repositories) or synapse (ppa:synapse-core/testing ppa has a trusty build). I moved from gnome-do to synapse a while ago just because it feels faster.
Sadly, synapse is orphaned, Kupfer hasn't had a commit in over a year and GNOME-Do is going nowhere since GNOME Shell does the same thing by itself. One thing that's kept me from more minimal environments than those with their own launcher is that's there's just no really good standalone launcher.
Synapse may not have an active upstream any more, but, well, the Ubuntu package is still well-maintained (in the synapse-core/testing ppa), and it does everything I need it to.
An aversion to orphaned software is clearly good for things at a security boundary (web browsers, sshd, etc), but is it really an issue for a launcher? In 3-5 years it may not be good enough, but shrug, if that's the case I'll have another look around then. It's not like launchers have lock-in.
