In this tutorial, you will learn how to install xfce on Ubuntu 23.04. Xfce is a very lightweight desktop environment that you can use on any low end computer or server.
Because of its 'lightweightness' xfce is a great choice when it comes to choosing a desktop environment for your machine, whether this machine is a computer or a server.
However, just because it is lightweight it doesn't mean that you can't run it on your high end computer, the only downside on this would be gpu drivers if you have a recent gpu card on your desktop then you may need to look up if xfce runs fine and supports the gpu drivers that your card needs.
Step 1 - Install XFCE
To install xfce on Ubuntu 23.04, run the command below
sudo apt install xfce4Next, confirm by pressing the Y button, and the downloading of xfce desktop environment will start.
Step 2 - Choose display manager
Once xfce has been installed on your machine, you'll be prompted with Choose a display manager window, in this step you need to choose the display manager that you want to use.
You can go with lightdm or GDM3, gdm3 is the default display manager for Ubuntu. So, if you want to use the default gnome desktop environment then choose gdm3, if you want to be able to use other desktop environments, such as xfce that we are installing in this tutorial, then you need to use the lightdm display manager.
Choose the display manager and press enter, and give it some time to complete. This won't take long, however it depends on your machine's specs and internet speed.
Step 3 - Reboot your Machine
Once you have installed the desktop environment, you need to reboot in order to make sure that you can use it.
Step 4 - Start XFCE Session
Now on the login screen, click the ubuntu icon at top right as shown in the image below
and select XFCE as session to login
and xfce session should start once you authenticate if you are using a password for your account.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we explained step by step how to install xfce desktop environment on Ubuntu 23.04 Desktop version.
