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An erratic Xfce4 Black Screen (WIP)

Ingo Steinke, web developer on January 16, 2026

Although I remain skeptical about AI, it often helps when you're quite clueless and have nothing to lose: even hallucinated lies can be better than...
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leob

But it's still not solved? Maybe just dump Xfce and switch to a "mainstream" display manager (KDE or Gnome, and then preferably the "classic" variants)?

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Ingo Steinke, web developer • Edited

Yes, that's still less risk than changing drivers or configuration. No, not solved, as it's only erratic and I don't need to shutdown every day, I probably got lazy. Thanks for reminding me of the simple alternative!

I had other issues after an Ubuntu distribution upgrade in 2024, and cinnamon seemed too restricted so I felt returning to Xfce also visually going back to the good old days. Maybe I took one step too far backwards though.

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Debajyati Dey

I used to use XFCE4 in the past and used to love it. 1 year ago I tried to change taste and tried KDE and honestly it's good (apart from some nvidia-wayland issues). I definitely recommend KDE. I used KDE with x11 because the waylabd version crashes always with nvidia GPU

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Ingo Steinke, web developer

Interesting. Last time I used KDE it was version 0.x of an obscure alternative desktop system while I struggled to get X11 working at all on my 486 PC with SuSE 2.x or something, haha. I should really try and see how it evolved. Is KDE an option for Mint though?

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Debajyati Dey

I think so. Although it is not officially supported by mint, it should work without problems.

Here is a not too old tutorial for your reference (in case you need something) - linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-kde...

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leob

Gnome classic works for me - not Gnome "Unity", with its huge showy sidebar, which (for me at least) just clutters and gets in the way, and doesn't seem to do anything that I need - but Gnome "classic", with its simple Windows 95/XP style taskbar at the bottom, showing my active/running applications so that I can easily and simply switch between them - and a way to launch apps (via icons or a menu) - and that's it really, nothing more !

That plain, simple, and lovely taskbar is Microsoft's best invention ever - until they messed it up in Windows Vista and later by adding tons of useless features to it ;-)

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Grant Macleod

nice