A while back I wrote about TopMenu, a panel plugin that provides global menu (AppMenu) support for MATE, then also included support for Xfce and LXDE.

Here's where Vala Panel AppMenu comes in.

Vala Panel AppMenu is a global menu panel applet for Xfce, MATE and Vala panels, which uses unity-gtk-module as its backend, and it works with all the applications supported by Unity's AppMenu.

The Xfce developers are busy porting Xfce applications and components to GTK3, and in the process, they are also adding new features.

"Do not disturb", a much requested feature, landed in xfce4-notifyd 0.3.4 (the Xfce notification daemon) recently. Using this, you can suppress notification bubbles for a limited time-frame.

The applets are highly configurable, allowing you to select the orientation, change the graph size, update interval, and it also ships with quite a few color schemes.

With the latest 1.4.0 release, Multiload-ng includes a Unity (and others) AppIndicator, as well as a systray applet. 

TopMenu (a global menu for MATE, Xfce and LXDE panels) is available in the official Ubuntu 16.04 repositories and it works great in Ubuntu MATE 16.04, but it doesn't work in Xubuntu 16.04 and Lubuntu 16.04 by simply installing the panel applet package.

Here's how to get TopMenu to work in Xubuntu 16.04 and Lubuntu 16.04, using the official packages, with a minor tweak.

GNOME 3.18 added the ability to access Google Drive directly from Files (Nautilus). To use this feature, all you have to do is add your Google account to GNOME Online Accounts and enable "Files":

Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus already includes GNOME 3.18 for the most part however, because Unity doesn't use GNOME Control Center (also known as GNOME System Settings or just Settings) and GNOME Online Accounts and instead, it ships with a fork (unity-control-center), it doesn't include this feature by default.

Even so, you can use the GNOME 3.18 Google Drive integration in Unity as well as other desktop environments, as long as you use Ubuntu (and derivatives: Xubuntu, etc.) 16.04 Xenial Xerus. This won't work with Ubuntu versions older than 16.04!

Update: this also works with Ubuntu 16.10 and Linux Mint 18.x.

According to a Launchpad bug report, a new application, called Xfce Panel Switch, should be included by default with Xubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf. The package is currently in the Wily new queue.

Xfce Panel Switch is a layout manager for the Xfce panel which allows users to easily backup, restore, import and export the Xfce panel configuration:

A week ago, the Xubuntu team members were asked to vote if Xubuntu 15.10 should drop GIMP, Abiword and Gnumeric and include LibreOffice by default.