Welcome to my brief installation guide for XRDP and the XFCE desktop environment on a CentOS 7 or 8 Core system ("Core" equals a command line system without a GUI). This guide has been made using two Hyper-V VMs running CentOS 7 and 8 Core minimal as their OSs in a local network environment. Thus both VMs didn't have a dedicated WAN address. This does differ greatly from a server with a dedicated WAN address in terms of the necessary changes to the firewall and port unlocking. When possible I will provide necessary commands that apply to the firewall on a server to unlock the right port(s).

Depending on the virtualization technology you are using you might not have a different experience. I'm not responsible for bricked systems. I recommend to perform this installation on a clean and up to date system.

Let's get started.

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1. Connect to your system and login as root or a user with sudo access. I'm using SSH to access my systems.
   
   Please keep in mind: if you are logged in as a user with sudo access you will have to use sudo before any of the commands displayed below where necessary (e.g. when installing packages).
   

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2. Update your system to the latest version using the command below.
   
   Command
   
   Code:

   yum update -y
   
   A personal recommendation: reboot your system after updating it to the latest versions to apply all changes and after that continue with the next step.
   

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3. Now we will perform the installation of XFCE. XFCE is not included in the CentOS software repos. Therefore we have to enable the included EPEL repos from Fedora to get XFCE and be able to install many other additional packages that aren't available in CentOS by default.
   
   Enable the EPEL repos using this commands:
   
   Code:

   yum install -y epel-release
yum update -y
   
   Now install XFCE with all necessary packages using this command:
   
   Code:

   yum groupinstall -y "Xfce"
   
   The download and installation of all packages will a take a bit. Let it run and wait for it to finish.
   

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4. At this point we're going to install the XRDP remote access system to be able to access our system via RDP.
   
   Install XRDP using the commands below:
   
   Code:

   yum install -y xrdp
systemctl enable xrdp
systemctl start xrdp
   
   On a server you need to open the RDP port using this commands:
   
   Code:

   firewall-cmd --add-port=3389/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload
   
   XRDP is now installed and running as a service.
   

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5. Now we need to create a configuration file for each user on your system that should be able to access the system via XRDP. This configuration file will tell the XRDP server what to do when the specific user connects to it. In this case it will launch the XFCE session.
   
   Run this commands as every user that should be able to connect via XRDP:
   
   Code:

   echo "xfce4-session" > ~/.Xclients
chmod a+x ~/.Xclients
   
   Once that is done you can attempt to connect to your server with a RDP client.
   

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6. Start your RDP client ("Remote Desktop Connection" on Windows), enter the IP address of your system and hit enter to connect to your system.
   
   When you get a security message regarding the server certificate simply tick the box to never ask about this again and confirm that you want to connect. I cannot provide a screenshot for this sadly as my OS is in Germany and not English.
   

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7. You will end up at the login screen of XRDP. There you have to login with the user information of a user on your system that is setup to login via XRDP.
   
   Just type in the username and password.
   
   Screenshot
   
   

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8. You will now see a XFCE environment. At the first connection you will see a popup that will ask you how you want to initialize XFCE on your system. Click on "Use default panel".
   
   Screenshot
   
   
   This will create a default XFCE configuration with a panel at the top and a quick launch bar at the bottom.
   
   Screenshot
   
   
   I noticed that on CentOS 8 you will not be asked how to initialize XFCE on your system. It will by default initalize XFCE with the default configuration. There is not a big difference. A newer XFCE version with a few changes in the UI.
   
   Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/XaGjbns.png
   

That's it folks. Now you have a CentOS 7 or 8 system with the XFCE desktop environment and you can connect to it using the RDP protocol and RDP clients that are usually all built into Windows by default already. A great RDP client for Linux is Remmina.