On Tue, Nov 03, 2026 at 15:29:51 -0800, Donald MacDougall wrote: > Fair enough. I misunderstood your usage of the term "omit". I thought you > were referring to thing I did surrounding the occurrence of the problem. I > wasn't thinking of things that I've always done for 20 plus years. I'd been > logging in from the command line long before I ever installed X11.
I also use startx. It's not common these days, but it's still supported. > In fact another detail I've omitted from years back is the fact that I > installed and used X11 many years before I installed XFCE. I downloaded and > installed my own choice of applications such as Gnumeric and several > different word professors. I looked at Gnome and KDE and found them too big > and unnecessary. XFCE seemed to just provide a desktop and leave me to still > choose my own apps. I don't really remember why I installed it. I did it > probably 10 years ago or less. XFCE runs on top of X11. Yes, it's "just a desktop (environment)" and you'll add other applications to run on top of XFCE. XFCE is one of the common choices among desktop environments. If it works for you, that's fantastic. I can't personally help with it, but there are other people who can. > Probably obvious since X11 isn't running. > Maybe I should uninstall XFCE and just go back to X11. You need to figure out what's wrong, first. Just randomly uninstalling things that you use isn't likely to help you diagnose the issue. (Besides, what window manager or desktop environment would you be using if you uninstalled XFCE? You really need *some* window manager.) Check everything that you can check: * Disk space. * Any significant kernel errors in dmesg. * Any significant errors in ~/.xsession-errors (this can be a very noisy log file even when everything's working, sadly). * Any significant errors in your Xorg.0.log file. * Any significant errors in journalctl. * Starting X with just an xterm (startx xterm). * Whatever else I've forgotten, that anyone else in this thread might have suggested looking at.
