Review of freshly installed Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop

After the tutorial on how to install Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop this tutorial is mainly to see what to expect from a freshly installed Fedora 36 Xfce Desktop – the look and feel of the new Xfce GUI (Xfce version – 4.18). The Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop is part of Fedora spins – https://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/
Here you can find out how to install it – Install Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop.
The idea of this article is to see what to expect from Fedora 38 Xfce – the look and feel of the GUI, the default installed programs, and their look and how to do some basic steps with them. Here you’ll find more than 170 screenshots and not so many texts we do not want to turn this review of many texts and version information and 3 meaningless screenshots, which you could not see anything for the user interface because these days it is the primary goal of a Desktop system. You can expect more of this kind of review in the future.
This article is the first part of reviewing the Fedora 36 Xfce Desktop. The second article contains Xfce Settings screenshots that are coming soon.

Xfce is a collection of programs that provides a features-rich desktop environment.

Here are some core elements:

  • Window Manager (xfwm4) – Handles the placement of windows on the screen.
  • Panel (xfce4-panel) – Provides a home for window buttons, launchers, app menu and more.
  • Desktop Manager (xfdesktop) – Sets desktop backgrounds, handles icons and more.
  • File Manager (thunar) – Manages your files in a modern, easy-to-use and fast way.
  • Volume Manager (thunar-volman) – Manages removable drives and media for Thunar.
  • Session Manager (xfce4-session) – Saves and restores your session, handles startup, autostart and shutdown.
  • Setting System (xfce4-settings) – Configures appearance, display, keyboard, and mouse settings.
  • Application Finder (xfce4-appfinder) – Quickly finds and launches applications installed on your system
  • Settings Daemon (xfconf) – Stores your settings in a D-Bus-based configuration system.
  • A Menu Library (garcon) – Implements a freedesktp.org compliant menu based on GLib and GIO.
  • Thumbnails Services (tumbler) – Implements the thumbnails management D-Bus specification.

Fedora 38 Xfce screenshots

SCREENSHOT 1) Fedora (6.2.9-300.fc38.x86_64) 38 (Xfce)

main menu
grub 2 entry boot

Keep on reading!

Install Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop

This article will show the simple steps of installing a modern Linux DistributionFedora 38 Xfce Desktop with Xfce for the graphical user interface – one of the alternatives, which tries to break the domination of GNOME and partly KDE Plasma. First, it is offered the basic steps for installing the Operating system and then there are some screenshots of the installed system and its look and feel. Here is another article available with more screenshots of the installed and working Fedora 38 Xfce DesktopReview of freshly installed Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop.
Xfce offers a fast, easy, and lightweight graphical environment for Linux systems and Fedora teams bring it out-of-the-box with their spins projects – Fedora Xfce Spin
This is the simplest setup. One hard disk device in the system is installed, which is detected as sda and the entire disk will be used for the installation of Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop. All disk information in sda disk device will be permanently deleted by the installation wizard!

The Fedora 38 Xfce Desktop comes with:

  • linux kernel – 6.2.9
  • Xorg X11 server – 1.20.14 and Xorg X11 server XWayland 22.1.9 is used by default
  • Xfce: 4.18, which is the latest stable as of the official Xfce site.

For more packages and versions information the user may check out the Fedora 38 server articles – Software and technical details of Fedora Server 38 including cockpit screenshots.

We used the following ISO for the installation process:
https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/38/Spins/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Xfce-Live-x86_64-38-1.6.iso
The ISO may be burnt on a disk or written on a USB stick. Just boot up from it.

The simplest way to make a bootable USB drive is to just use the Linux command dd. First, download the ISO file above and then plug the USB drive into the computer and find out the device name, it should be something of /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc (execute the dmesg command in the console and check the last lines for the USB drive detection and its device name like /dev/sd?). After knowing the USB device name issue the dd command to overwrite it with the ISO. Note, all data will be lost if you use the following command with the device name mentioned in the command line.

myuser@mydesktop ~ # dd if=/mnt/media/OS/Fedora/Fedora-Xfce-Live-x86_64-38-1.6.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct
1610612736 bytes (1.6 GB, 1.5 GiB) copied, 11 s, 146 MB/s1683156992 bytes (1.7 GB, 1.6 GiB) copied, 11.4234 s, 147 MB/s

200+1 records in
200+1 records out
1683156992 bytes (1.7 GB, 1.6 GiB) copied, 11.4559 s, 147 MB/s

The USB flash drive should have at least 4G space. Using the dd command will overwrite the data on the USB drive without warning or confirmation!

The user can check what device name the just-plugged USB Drive has with dmesg console command:

myuser@mydesktop ~ # dmesg|tail -n 20
[1111445.079524] usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[1111445.079526] usb 3-2: Product: IS888 USB3.0 to SATA bridge
[1111445.079528] usb 3-2: Manufacturer: Innostor Technology
[1111445.079529] usb 3-2: SerialNumber: 088810000000
[1111445.083169] usb-storage 3-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[1111445.083301] scsi host6: usb-storage 3-2:1.0
[1111446.092244] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     KINGSTON  SNV425S2128GB        PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[1111446.093165] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[1111446.093586] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
[1111446.093883] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[1111446.093886] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[1111446.094489] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page found
[1111446.094497] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[1111446.100093] GPT:Primary header thinks Alt. header is not at the end of the disk.
[1111446.100102] GPT:1402999 != 250069679
[1111446.100104] GPT:Alternate GPT header not at the end of the disk.
[1111446.100105] GPT:1402999 != 250069679
[1111446.100106] GPT: Use GNU Parted to correct GPT errors.
[1111446.100148]  sdd: sdd1 sdd2 sdd3
[1111446.100623] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

The just-plugged USB drive is attached to the system with the device name /dev/sdd.

SCREENSHOT 1) Boot from the UEFI USB Kingston drive.

It is the same as the UEFI USB CD/DVD-ROM bootable device. Choose the UEFI USB drive and boot the installation live drive.

main menu
UEFI BIOS USB boot

Keep on reading!