Okay, I got it installed, using MATE as the X window manager.
For you that don't know what that is, today it is often called
the DESKTOP OR DISPLAY MANAGER. For many years it was called
the X windows manager.

Anyway I installed with that MATE manager, and did not like
it. So I tried to install gnome as the manager. I found
the procedures to install it on internet, but while installing,
I unplugged my external monitor, and things went to hell.

I not only lost the external monitor, the one on my laptop
also disappeared. So now I had no monitor while this POS
was trying to install gnome.

Eventually I gave up on that and just wanted to run the
thing with whatever MATE gave me. That did not work,
I could find no popups from the lower left button that
used to give me a half ass menu of hardly any use.
Now I did not even get the half ass menu.

I could run some some things by using the Xterm.

So I gave up and reinstalled the system. It worked
for about half an hour. Great, so I again decide
to install the gnome manager and this time make sure
I did not unplug the external monitor. Found a website
with instructions, and went through the install
for gnome using some command line efforts, since
I could not get anything to give me a gui interface.

Things went okay, except I got a couple things I
had to reply to with no way in the world of knowing
what the hell they wanted, but somehow it got all
installed.

Now nothing worked. I could not even log out. So
I cut the power and killed it that way.

Rebooted, and system came up.

It was now using Xcfe as the X window manager. Okay,
that was not what I had tried to do, but I can live
with it, if it works.

It seems to be working. The last time I used Xcfe was
with slackware, and it had some bugs in it that were
irritating. Maybe it is fixed now.

XFCE4 is a desktop environment, which uses a window manager (of your choice), on top of a windowing system (X11), all launched by the display manager (of your choice).

So, if we use the established terminology, what is your question?

No question, the first installation I did, was the first one
that ever blew up video output while it was doing an update.
I just thought that so unusual I wanted to comment on it.
Also, after that episode, the system would not successfully
update, it froze at some point, which was also unusual.
I had to reinstall system to get it working again.

Anyway, XCFE is now working fine.