[CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

Thu Feb 11 20:13:25 UTC 2021
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 2/11/21 11:18 AM, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
> For the past couple years, my solution has been to use RHEL clones 
> (CentOS and Oracle Linux) on servers only (multi-user.target). I've 
> moved all my graphical installations (workstation, laptops, desktop 
> clients) to OpenSUSE Leap + KDE. 

For a really long time I was pretty successful in running EL on both the 
desktop and the server.  It HAS been getting way harder to do this.  The 
EPEL, ELrepo, and RPMfusion repositories do a fantastic job overall, but 
there were way too many things missing from EPEL8 especially where the 
desktop experience was becoming a pretty sizable drain on my time 
building the packages I needed from Fedora.  KiCAD and Sigrok were the 
toughest.

I greatly prefer running the same OS version on my desktops and servers; 
makes management a lot easier.  So this is part of why I am in the midst 
of evaluating a wholesale migration to Debian 10.  On the server it 
works well, if somewhat different in setup; on the desktop it works so 
much better, with a huge and maintained repository, where I haven't had 
to dip into a PPA but once, and that was for a quick one-off package.  
It's in the virtualization arena where I am gobsmacked; I'm evaluating 
Proxmox, which is based on Debian 10, using the no-subscription 
repositories.  Let me tell you, Proxmox has one more slick and highly 
integrated experience. Relative to running a KVM host with only the 
stock CentOS 8 cockpit and virt-manager, the Proxmox experience blew me 
away.

I didn't realize just how much time I was spending finding third-party 
packages for EL8 until I didn't have to.

Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in EPEL has 
a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with, amongst 
other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon to 
EL and needs to be very tightly controlled.  It's just more difficult to 
get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm as 
long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm -ba' 
.... back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot wasn't a 
cardinal sin.....