To install the full Xfce desktop environment and utilities, install the xfce4 package. Your display manager should allow you to select the appropriate desktop before logging in. You can install Xfce as the only desktop environment on your computer, or alongside another desktop environment. Install Xfce in an already installed system Install Xfce in an already installed systemĭuring Debian installation, select Xfce desktop environment at the Selecting and Installing Software installation step.Īlternatively, at the Debian Installer boot prompt, press the Tab key to edit the command line, then add desktop=xfce.įor a complete rundown refer to the Debian Desktop Howto.Ī Debian live system with Xfce is available at.On those boxes, I have switched to the 'clearlooks-phenix' theme (), which has the old legacy scroll-bar behavior that modern themes don't seem to use anymore. My favorite theme is the old 'crux' look, which is not available for the latest XFCE distributions (including the one bundled with Xubuntu 20.04 and later).

My only disappointment is that the most recent versions did away with support for Gnome 2 themes. But its memory and CPU footprint is still very small. It discovers and auto-mounts removable media, so I don't have to think about attaching thumb drives and SD cards. More specifically, things like USB storage devices are really awkward, because you need to manually figure out the device name and how to mount their volumes - something modern desktops with file managers do automatically. Ordinarily, I would be happy to stick with fvwm, except that it is too stripped-down for a modern Linux installation. The most 'advanced' window manager I used for a long time was the 'fvwm' window manager, which allowed me a certain amount of customization. I started using Unix systems back when it was a choice between the twm or mwm window managers. I've never liked the heavyweight desktops like Gnome/Unity. It is my personal standard desktop these days - when setting up new Linux boxes/VMs, I use the 'Xubuntu' distribution, which is Ubuntu with XFCE installed as the default destkop.

Debian xfce