On Friday, July 24 2015, David Collier-Brown wrote:
For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version to host recent tools on.
I think you meant RHEL-7.1, right? RHEL-7.2 has not been released yet.
Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with.. 86_64 GNU/Linux
Out of curiosity, why do you say that Fedora "tends to lag in app version"? The Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain are well maintained and up-to-date; popular desktop programs as well, at least in my experience.
Alas, RHEL 7.2 seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21 Yum can't even do a groupinstall,
Do you mean yum does not recognize the "groupinstall" command at all? As you have mentioned below, yum actually *can* do a groupinstall without problems.
and half the required packages for xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories.
You have to enable the 'optional' and 'extras' repositories on RHEL-7 in order to get the necessary dependencies for EPEL packages. Take a look at: <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL>
Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies
Building from scratch may depend on other packages indeed, depending on the features you enable while configuring.
This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did $ sudo yum install epel-release $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system" $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce and were done.
I tested it here on a pristine RHEL-7.1, and all I needed to do was installing the EPEL repository and 'yum groupinstall Xfce' worked fine.
Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using something else?
No, Red Hat has not been degrading anything. However, you might take into consideration that RHEL is an Enterprise GNU/Linux edition, and as such its goal is to be as stable as possible while still offering important upstream features to the customers. Red Hat does not package XFCE for any version of RHEL; such packages have always been considered "third-party" and provided by EPEL (at least some of them).
Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?
You do not need to downgrade to RHEL-6 to get XFCE working. Using EPEL is more than enough for this. Cheers, -- Sergio GPG key ID: 237A 54B1 0287 28BF 00EF 31F4 D0EB 7628 65FC 5E36 Please send encrypted e-mail if possible http://sergiodj.net/