XFCE avoids the plague which affects rest of the software industry (me included) - dedicate design, marketing, and development teams who constantly have to add something to justify their jobs and bonuses. Look at the number of app updates on mobile phones, every freaking week there is a update available. If you don't update they will eventually block older versions.
Argh. I've seen this problem over and over on a variety of Ubuntu versions over the years, as if they don't want me resizing windows.
Is there any way to tweak this? I'm not at all liking it. My 16.04 installations are much better in this regard.
The width of the grab area is controlled by the theme." 1
Most people appear to circumvent the problem by using another means of resizing windows.
"As soon as your keyboard-shortcut (in Xfce upstream its Alt+F8) is hit, you can then resize the window by either moving your mouse (no need to click or drag) or use your keyboard arrow keys." 2
1 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156435/how-can-i-ma...
2 https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...
I understand that there are times when that isn't work so it's nice to have both options. ( I wrote a browser based windowing system and have experimented with having the bezels on the windows be quite large and/or auto-expanding when the mouse nears them to make resizes as easy as possible since hard to hit pixel thing annoys me so much)
I know it's not a fix, and it is still cumbersome if all you have at the moment is a laptop trackpad. But it beats having to update your destkop environment's chrome and all that jazz. I find XFCE's window chrome pleasing and minimal, the only issue is exactly that, you only have 1px of hot area at the borders.