[GTALUG] XFCE on regular Red Hat

[David Collier-Brown]

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.

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

Alas, RHEL 7.2  seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21
Yum can't even do a groupinstall, and half the required packages for 
xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories.
Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies

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.

Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using 
something else?
Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?

What are you folks using for prod?

--dave
$uname -a
Linux miles 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri May 15 21:38:46 EDT 
2015 x86_64 x86_64 x

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain