We have been using the XFCE desktop on RHEL 9 and are preparing to migrate our cluster to RHEL 10. Neither XFCE nor MATE are available on RHEL 10 and we’re looking for a lighter weight option than GNOME. Is there a recommended migration path? Has anyone tried using IceWM? (It’s available on RHEL10.) We use Apptainer for some apps, but are looking for an option that doesn’t require creating new images for each minor change to an app.
From what I’ve heard on this forum it’s a struggle to get RHEL 10 support for desktops. OSC doesn’t have any official solution yet, sorry!
It boils down to EL10 switching to Wayland instead of X. We are actively having discussions on how to best address this since it’s not going to be unique to EL10. But it’s a pretty big project. We intend to provide some sort of solution / resolution in the coming months.
@jeff.ohrstrom @alanc Thanks for this information!
I actually have some potentially good news. Me and a colleague as very interested in this and have done quite a bit of work on this area.
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A while back I packaged entire XFCE, built from source, as part of EasyBuild. This will be included in EESSI (EFP) as well (eventually). For X11 desktop, Xorg-server would still logically come from the OS (Xorg itself is actually really easy to also build from source, but if one installs the necessary nvidia glx + driver packages, it would install xorg-server on the host anyway). I think this would just work on EL10, just load a module and
vncserver -xstartup xfce4_session.sh. There is also Quickshell, Openbox, xterm etc and a few other things in packaged in EasyBuild, so one can also run a classic combine-as-you-want X11 desktop of days past. -
I also packaged all the wayland stuff (some of this is still slightly work-in-progress) in EasyBuild, including. labwc, sway, wayvnc, xwayland and many more components. It’s very possible today to run labwc + xfce + wayvnc and have a 90% working Xfce desktop, under wayland, over VNC. Headless, GPU accelerated, full Xwayland support. EGL, GLX, Vulkan apps all just work with GPU support, all without the need for VirtualGL.
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We also have experimental setup for RDP, allowing out OOD users to download a connection file and connect, via RDP-gateway running alongside the http-reverse-proxy on the OOD-server. This allows users to run with a local RDP client (Remmina, mstsc, Devolutions) directly against the compute nodes (which do not have public IPs).
Definitely a whole bunch of devils in the details here; but in summary, we actually have OOD interactive apps that run Wayland, with VNC or RDP (native of via Guacamole web translation). All X11 apps work fine over XWayland as much as I’ve tested. Full 3D support natively (if you have a GPU), no LD_PRELOAD hacks, no background X-server.
As long as one has the KMS/GDM/DRM parts from the kernel, the rest of the liux graphics stack really is just unprivileged userspace apps. For software rendering it’s even easier.
I’m currently working on a few things here
- FreeRDP3 + Weston in EasyBuild (and using weston as a layer)
- Trying to find and fix the client-resize bug in Remminas VNC client.
- Developing my own simple Quickshell panels and desktop backgrouns, optimized for the my cluster environment. (panels and backgrounds are just apps).
- Trying to get a fix in NoVNC upstream (they don’t allow usernames as a url parameter, only passwords, and this isn’t good enough for PAM-auth)
- Probably want to package some of the Xrdp stuff in EasyBuild as well (but rdp-sesman would still need to run on the OS).
- Testing out cage compositor (wlroots based, so will work with wayvnc). This is a compositor intended for single full screen applications. So this would work great if people wanted to provide OOD-apps that just launch a single graphical application
- xfce4-desktop doesn’t support wayland. You can swaybg. It also doesn’t support virtual desktop switching under Wayland. This support should be possible to add relatively easily as a custom xfce4-panel plugin.
I have been meaning to maybe do a presentation on some of this for the OOD zoom talks
@Micket Thanks for the information and references! Glad to hear this. Will read more about it.
@Micket we’d love to have you present at one of our Tips and Tricks calls! Just let us know which region you prefer since we have three of them now: Americas, EMEA, APAC.
I am in Europe. Not sure when the times the other presentations are, but 4PM CET would usually be good fit for me. I do have a lot of my vacation coming in during july-august, so maybe this waits til after summer breaks.
(I have a related talk on linux graphics stack, building things from source for EasyBuild in my talk from this year EasyBuild user meeting, slides and youtube playlists at 11th EasyBuild User Meeting (21-23 April 2026) , but i would be making a tailor made presentation focused on OOD instead)