I knew this group when they were at UIUC. Their work is really great and approachable. the concept of basic version control was foreign to them, so there seemed to be a lot of room for improvement on the non-scientific side. It is great that they have started to fix those issues. Seriously consider this job is you are interesting in the mix between hardware and software.
just install XFCE and don't worry about it. as long as the apt repositories are stable, let them play with their GUI and you can go back worry about something more interesting.