I just installed Stretch RC1 on a laptop HP pavilion, I killed the HDD to get rid of the M$ cr#p and did a manual partition, everything fine there.
I followed the steps to install a graphical environment with smxi, did not accept the installer's option, installed base + kde with smxi but after reboot no boot into the kde desktop, what am I missing also installed inxi. inxi -G reports (I am typing form a different computer, please bear with me). The card is ATI-Radeon Wrestler HD 6320, drivers installed are modesetting, nouveau, vmware, fbdev, ati, vesa, radeon, amdgpu.
What am I doing wrong?
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x is probably crashing because there's no adequate driver for your amd card. However, before anything else, try to start a non kde desktop, a light one, like fluxbox. See if that one starts before doing any more digging, I had to give up on kde due to its catastrophic failures to even start the desktop, sddm also is not great.

Note that catalyst non free fglrx last release is now more than 1 year ago, 2015-12.

You could try forcing radeon driver install.

sgfxi -N radeon

but I'm not up on radeon stuff, I've given up on any new amd card for gnu/linux since they have totally stopped releasing their non free driver blobs.

You can see it by this:

cat /var/Xorg.0.log | tail -n 40

that will usually show the cause of X start failure.

You're also hurting yourself by also trying to use kde, which I've personally totally given up on, except for some of their programs/software, which are still good.

Also, are we talking blackscreen blinking single line fail, or black nothing fail, or fallback to systemd fail?

can you login via ctrl+alt_f1? to console, that is?

the modesetting driver is kind of the default, but it could well not support your card, that wouldn't surprise me at all. If it's an x230, that's not too new, so it shouldn't be something required.

note that even though the old fglrx would support your card, it wouldn't support the newer kernels or xorg versions.

amd users are screwed, lol. I'd try the radeon driver and see if you get better luck with that.
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Thanks for answer.
You are probably right about kde, it is excruciatingly slow and prone to failure, but Im used to it and cannot afford to experiment, it works fine on my desktop which is a beast in computing power and memory, but not that good on the old Pavilion.
This is what I did; since the RC1 installer was complaining about missing firmware, I searched for it in my working computer and downloaded it to USB stick, when prompted plugged stick, accepted the option in the installer and apparently it took it because it did not complain and continued with installation, then much to my chagrin I installed the KDE desktop environment from the installer, and slow like molasses KDE started.
I think also the new kernel helped to get it up.
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try xfce 4, the current releases aren't that different from kde 3.5 in terms of features, but it does take a little bit more to get it all configured/setup.

You'll be amazed at the speed difference.

kde has lost the track, not only are they totally ruining it every major new release, each release is worse than the last, 5 is worse than 4, and 4 was worse than 3.5, which was a very solid fast good desktop.

Most of xfce 4 now 'just works'.

the smxi xfce installer will install a lot of useful packages too.
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will install that from smxi, will I have the option to boot either one?
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You don't boot desktops, you boot the OS. When the desktop login manager appears, it has a list of installed desktops, you select which one you want to start. There's a desktop selector button somewhere on most of them, except for the ones that don't log in, just start the desktop. sddm, lightdm, all have this item. The last logged in desktop usually is the default. I have a ton of them, for testing etc. But I only use xfce.

I like to always have at least one light one, like fluxbox, that takes almost no space and is very simple, but that will start always if the more complex one fails, one that I use, xfce4, and I also keep gnome/kde to look at now and then, though as far as I'm concerned, both of them are totally gone, ruined by amateur user behavior kids fresh out of college, or even not out yet.

xfce has been treading the middle path, incremental slow improvements, fix things that are glitchy, add features you can support, don't blow the whole thing up just to use a new toolkit version, all quite responsible and adult, which is kind of weird when you compare it to gnome or kde, which seem to favor ruining your life so they can play with the latest shiny toys while letting core functionality, like being fast and quick and efficient, fall by the wayside. xfce proves that you don't need to be slow to be full featured.
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I am not getting the choice of which desktop to use, the mchine goes directly to kde, although xfce is installed via smxi.
The problem is that kde sometimes manages to pull up the desktop and sometimes it just hangs in the middle of the process. How can I get the chice, am I missing a package?
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You have to be specific.

Do you get a login box? If you do, there's somewhere on the screen that lets you select which desktop to start.

If you don't, that's a different thing.

kde failing on start is normal and expected, it's why I no longer use it or trust their developers to not screw up kde every major new release version. Since they denied such issues existed, it's going to be hard for them to fix them. sddm is the dm they recommend, but you have to provide me with details.

If you are not seeing the login box, just a black screen, that's one thing, if you are seeing it, but aren't seeing the desktop selector, that means you aren't looking, if you see the gui desktop and no login box but it hangs, that's a different thing. Be specific.

I wasted over a week on my kde 5 failures before I decided to dump kde once and for all, I'd wasted even more time waiting for kde 4 to get usable, but the second I setup xfce I realized that I'd just lowered my expectations consistently with kde, until I accepted utterly unacceptable desktop speed and performance. I no longer consider the kde project as capable of delivering a working production desktop, it just seems to be kids playing with toys.
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I see the login box but no selector, I am using sddm, after login just black screen with a big K, that's it.
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I have lightdm installed too, but I don't remember which file to modify to select it as the ddefault dm.
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