I use XFCE for my desktop environment. I've had a lot of...hmmm....issues...since the recent upgrade of xfce4, including but not limited to completely recreating my desktop experience. Now I notice that a package that I would have referred to as xfce4-desktop in my Gentoo days, is not available on Slackware. Furthermore, my desktop is...not there. I shut down my computer every night and turn my power strip to the computer OFF. I easily accomplish this by Cntrl+Alt+D to go to the desktop. Which is blank. I can't even get a context menu there. My background wallpaper, although the file is still in ~/ (because I couldn't get the new wizard to access the actual folder where my backgrounds live) is not displayed. Why? Which log files should I be checking to help me diagnose this issue? Thank you in advance for anyone willing to advise me on this.

From a command prompt, as regular user, run the command xwmconfig.

You should get a list of the window managers available on Slackware. Arrow up or down to xfce. click ok. Now run the command startx.

Post any errors you get with either command. On a full install of Slackware, that will start xfce desktop.

Post the results.

Do I have to do the above without X running, because if so I'll need to know how to shut down X. I did a Ctrl+Alt+1 and logged in as root and killed xfce-session, but it just restarted. How do I shut it down? On Gentoo, I would have issued a /etc/init.d/xdm stop and that would have stopped the xwindows session. I'm not sure how to do it on Slackware...

I decided to try it anyway. From my personal experience, if you issue a startx command while X is already running, it fails. I thought there wasn't any harm in attempting to follow your advice. Thank you for attempting to help me.

/sbin/shutdown -h now

That will shut the entire computer down! I just want the X service shut down, don't I?

As root, run 'init 3' in Slackware to stop any X session.

I do that if I want to install a new video driver.

I'm a little confused by your posts. 1st post seemed to suggest X and xfce were not running.

Can you clarify what the problem is?

The problem is that I should be able to interact with my xfce4-desktop, but I can't. Everything else (that I can tell) works. I SHOULD be able to look at my desktop and see my wallpaper art, but I can't. I can't even right-click on it to pull up the context menu. It's just...blank. This should not be. Do you understand my issue now? And thank you for trying to help me.

try going in the back door aka cli , then rename your xfce4 conf dir to whatever you want, then login by starting xfce4. this should reestablish your xfce4 as a new desktop, then see if everything is working like it should then you can do your damage control on it if it is working as it should, ie as a new desktop.

that dir, just rename yours so you got it backed up.

you can login open a terminal, or file manager if possible then rename it that way, logout, then login again. same effects. whatever works for you ...

do you even see a mouse pointer BTW?

I renamed ~/.config/xfce4 to ~/.config/xfce4.bak. I logged out and back in again. I was greeted with a request for a new panel configuration, but my problem still persists. Where would the errors spit out to?

When you re-started Xfce after renaming your old configuration, you started with a "fresh" desktop. No wallpaper or anything else you did to the "old" desktop.
You have to start over from stratch.

That is why you keep your old dir so you can salvage what you need out of it to incorporate it into the new "fresh" desktop.

I had the same problem few weeks ago. I tried to change window manager to kde and go back to xfce, .. etc. kde was fine but nothing changed about xfce4 when I went back to xfce. I looked for solution in this forum but found nothing...

Then everything went back after 1 week!

I just found a thread in Xfce forum. Checked it and maybe you will find the solution.

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=21023

Following the advice in the above thread helped me solve this issue. Thank you! I logged out as michael and logged in as root, navigate to /home/michael/.cache and issued a rm -rf sessions. Then I logged back in as michael, and with the exception of my usual running programs were not started automatically, my desktop is there as it should be.

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