I wanted to mention, one can customize even further using dconf editor if they are comfortable tweaking in it. It is a stable platform, one i find most tools function properly on, which i can not say for a lot of distros. Installing Synaptic is a breeze, and any program you need from that point. I personally do not consider this DE ready to go out of the box, and the very first thing i do after updating is install synaptic and grab programs.