I’ve been running the same Fedora install since 2018. Not “Fedora” as a rolling habit of reinstalling every year or two — the same install. It started life as Fedora 28 or 29, I genuinely can’t remember which, and it’s currently sitting at Fedora 44. In between, it has been dnf-upgraded across something like sixteen releases without a single reinstall.
That’s the whole pitch of this post; everything else is detail.
What the box actually does
It’s a development machine, living in VirtualBox, not on bare metal. Nothing exotic; this is the box I actually get work done on, day in, day out. When I first set it up, I wanted something light enough not to fight the VM for resources, which is how the Fedora Xfce spin entered the picture in the first place: not out of ideology.
The desktop musical chairs
It started with the Xfce spin. I configured it, settled in, used it for a while. At some point I felt the need to configure things by hand and installed Awesome. Then i3. I think I even tried LXDE at some point. These days I mostly bounce between i3 and Xfce, depending on my mood and the truce between wrist and finger joints.
The point isn’t that I’m indecisive about desktops. It’s that the base system never noticed or cared. I think I’m finally settling on Xfce and if the tiling itch comes back, I’ll probably just run i3 as the window manager inside it rather than switch sessions entirely.
So why isn’t Fedora on the Xfce shortlist?
If you ask around for a lightweight Linux setup, you’ll hear three answers: Mint, Xubuntu, or Arch. Fedora doesn’t usually make the list, and I think I understand why.
Mint and Xubuntu are built for a specific kind of person: someone who wants Xfce but also doesn’t want to touch their system much. Fedora’s whole personality, as the six-month releases, newer packages, occasional sharp edges is arguably at odds with that goal. You’re pairing a “don’t rock the boat” desktop with a distro that rocks the boat on a schedule.
Arch, meanwhile, isn’t really competing for the same reason. Arch users pick Xfce (or i3, or whatever) almost as an afterthought, because they’re already building the whole system by hand. The base distro isn’t chosen for the desktop; the desktop is just whatever gets thrown at last. Just an FYI, I managed to install Arch and Xfce on top and didn’t hate it.
Fedora Xfce sits in a gap between those two crowds: a fast-moving base for someone who doesn’t want a demanding desktop riding on top of it. On paper, that sounds like a contradiction. In practice, it’s just been my machine for eight years.
The actual stress test
“It hasn’t broken” is a nice thing to say and a boring thing to prove. So here’s the part with some teeth to it.
For years, I was compiling against a 32-bit application server on what was otherwise a 64-bit system — the kind of setup that has a well-earned reputation for being fragile, because mixing library architectures can easily go sideways. Every dnf upgrade was a small bet that the next server upgrade won’t work or the application won’t compile.
It never was. That’s a stronger claim than “I upgraded and nothing happened,” because there was actually something to break. I’ve also moved this appliance across machines a couple of times — exported, imported, up and running, no drama.
I’ve hit the occasional VirtualBox-specific hiccup over the years; just the price of running any OS inside another OS.
The good, the bad, and the missing
The actual list is longer but I have trimmed it down to what I’ve genuinely hit, not a laundry list of every complaint I found online.
Good:
dnffeels more legible than juggling apt and PPAs, if that’s the mental model you prefer- SELinux on by default, which is a nice quiet safety net most Xfce spins don’t bother with
- Btrfs as the default filesystem, so a bad upgrade is a rollback away rather than a reinstall
Bad:
- Desktop versions might lag behind what ships on Fedora’s spins. You might have to wait a cycle or two for the newer release.
- The out-of-the-box panel and menu setup is fine, not great. You should expect to spend twenty minutes making it feel like yours.
Missing:
- No RPM Fusion or Flathub enabled by default, so codecs and a chunk of the app ecosystem require a manual first step. This one’s a Fedora-wide policy, not an Xfce problem, but it goes against a “lightweight and simple” spin that’s supposed to feel done on first boot.
About that theming thing
Here’s my one real complaint, and I want to be precise about it, because it’s not really about Xfce.
None of the lightweight desktops look good out of the box. Not Xfce, not i3, not Awesome. It’s not a small-team-can’t-afford-design-time excuse either. The pattern seems to be: any desktop that hands you real control arrives undressed, and the ones with a finished look (GNOME, for instance) get there by taking the choices away from you first.
For me personally, this barely registers as a complaint, because I already configure tmux, Alacritty, and Neovim from near-scratch every time I set up a box. Theming a desktop is just one more thing on a pile I’ve already made peace with.
It would just be nice, once in a while, if something came dressed.
Who this is actually for
I’m not going to pretend this is a verdict for everyone. If you want an Xfce box that looks and feels finished the day you install it, Xubuntu or Mint will get you there faster, with less homework and if you good with working with your hands, go Arch way.
But if what you actually want is a base that can survive being torn apart and rebuilt on top of, repeatedly, for the better part of a decade — that’s a narrower ask, and it’s the one Fedora Xfce has quietly answered for me since 2018. Could another distro have held up just as well? Sure, probably. But this is the one I started with, and it stayed. Not glamorous. Just still running.
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