Is there a proper way to use several DE's on one distro or is it not advised?
I have read many conflicting things, like always. Just wondering if there's a safe way to use several DE's on one distro without messing up my damn computer lol I've tried it several times and it always messed things up. I'm currently brand new to fedora workstation 38 too btw. Thanks alot
What things are being messed up? You should be able to just install as many DEs as you want without them interfering with each other - just select which you want on the login screen,
is it really that simple? I was trying ways to like separate them or block them from each other
No, it really is that simple. I've got Cinnamon installed since I prefer it for everyday; also, Gnome3 on Wayland for gaming (I've three monitors with different refresh rates, which doesn't work as you'd hope on X11). Log out, change desktop, log in again. No problems at all, except for more packages to update.
In general it is safe to install as many DEs as you want. There is some overlap between (user) configuration files though which might be annoying.
It should be fine to experiment, but you might need to restore some settings afterwards. For daily use I would just stick to one DE. Personally I don't think there is really a reason to use multiple DEs as a single user. It would throw me off and mess with my workflow.
Also keep in mind that many DE also provide a set of default tools which add clutter. So you probably want to keep it low for this reason alone.
thanks man, it's the explorer in me. I nixed that triple boot idea lol so I figured i would choose one distro (fedora 38) and experiement with DE's instead. it has not been working about great to say the least....
gdm works pretty well with selecting and jumping to all kinds of different DEs. It shouldn’t really be a problem. The only thing I might watch out for is KDE/gnome for example can install a TON of dependencies that you might not necessarily want in both. You can wind up with a lot of duplicate programs. and your home directory will be full of all kinds of config files.
But you can run hyprland, i3, xfce, awesome, etc alongside each other without too much hassle.
I have had the same arch linux install for the past 13 years and have been on a ton of different DEs in that time including times when I switched back and forth between a few concurrently installed. It never caused any issues for me other than trying to clean up all the K programs that had been installed, and cleaning up my home dir.
It can mess with configs, themes and some other annoying stuff so I never did it again but there is no big risk or anything, it's just a little tedious to fix small things afterwards!
ahhh I see, I don't quite know how to configure and tweak the new DE to work properly though. I also read to use different usernames for each DE, but I don't see why that matters.
If you create multiple user accounts you can contain the user specific parts for those accounts if I am not wrong, certain thing will probably still be a little messy but I only tried it on the same account before and never did again, that could pribably help a little!
There's no one "proper" way. Running multiple DEs shouldn't break anything, but each DE comes with it's own set of dependencies and other software, so it does add clutter. There will also be considerable overlap with config files, so if you change a setting in one DE, it could change settings when using another DE.
Having a separate user account per DE will prevent most of the configuration overlap, but it doesn't solve the abundance of packages you'll have installed from having multiple DEs. I don't think there's a great "clean" way to do it.
One thing I love about Linux though, is how relatively flexible the user home directory is. When moving to a new distro or PC, usually everything you need to copy over is within your home directory. For what you're trying to do, I'd consider throwing /home on a separate partition. That way, you can try out multiple DEs and distros, without blowing away your home folder. And you'd be surprised at how small your root partition can be, the vast majority of your storage should likely be reserved for /home. The Steam Deck, for example, uses a root partition that is only 5 gb. On a typical Linux system, I've found 64 gb to be plenty for root.
When switching distros and/or DEs, consider cleaning out various config files in your home folder. Almost all of them will be hidden files that have a filename that begins with a period. I only keep specific config files for programs I want to retain data for, like Google Chrome (.config/google-chrome), Thunderbird (.thunderbird), and Steam (.local/share/Steam). If you use SSH keys you'll want to keep your .ssh folder too. But deleting all other config files will give you a pretty clean start when changing DEs.
Thanks alot. just the fact that when I try to install the deepin environment, it looks totally off and many important parts are not even functional. so its hard to narrow down if that DE is just crap or if I'm doing it all wrong
Move to silverblue/kinoite and when the urge to use another DE just rebase the OStree to the other branch - Silverblue for Gnome, Kinoite for KDE, Sericea for sway, Vauxite for xfce and there are some other not yet official branches for other DEs on Quay
Other than some autostart apps, you are free to do whatever you want. I actually like having at least 2 DEs, one generic with default settings and one customized for everyday use. Also, they should use different backends. Then if I completely mess up with my config, I've got a fallback.
Autostarts are the one thing I'd point to too. It's nothing harmful but can be a little annoying if you need different scripts or tools to run on your different DEs.
If you haven't already give NixOS a go, used to have a dual boot as a fall back but using nix I've got the courage to screw around to my heart's content cause I can always just load an earlier version of my config and/or wipe the machine and be back up to speed in 20 minutes if need be
@flashgnash @Redo11 I use Debian and Arch and could also wipe out my machine and be back in 20 mins or less. Nix is great but this is not Nix specific. As long as you have a backup of your files and config, recovery is quick on basically any distro.
I'm an ultra-noob, so those who know more please correct me.
I'm playing with Linux VMs and recently I installed Debian to check it out. When it asked what DE I wanted, I chose all of them :).
The only hard conflict (AFAIK) is the compontent / feature responsible for loging in (I don't know the technical term). Because each DE comes with a different one, you need to choose one.
What I found very confusing in practice is that I could see some DE apps and configuration settings from other DEs. So, unless you know what belongs to what, it's a bit of a mess (in my VERY limited experience).
Destop Manager (DM).
There a couple of them. Gnome has it's preferred, I'd risk KDE has its own (was never a user of KDE), there is LightDM, etc.
And they tend to dislike eachother
LightDM says it's a Display Manager.
I know that naming is hard but, oh my..., terms are so confusing when you're starting:
... I'm still not sure which ones are synonyms, sub categories or independent components :/.
The program responsible for logging in and starting your window manager is called the display manager. Sddm is the default for KDE and GDM is the default for Gnome.
Technically, you don't even need a display manager as you could login and start the window manager manually directly from the TTY. That's just mainly useful for when you break something in your display manager config though.
I have kind of messed some things up by installing KDE on my Fedora that already has Gnome. This was almost a year ago, now. I would not advise doing this. It is a bigger hassle than it was worth, and I'm just looking forward to a free moment when I can wipe and clean install.
I'm curious what things were "messed up". I tend to not install more than one on my machine, but at the very least it seems like it should be a typical usecase for multiple users on the same machine to prefer different DEs when they log in. If that breaks somehow, it sounds like someone has a bug.
Some aspects of theming are messed up, like the spacers on my GTK4 drop menus are just flat gray rectangles (they look like placeholder assets). Also launching some programs after a fresh boot now take an inexplicable long time, but only the first time. So for example, if I reboot and launch Firefox or Nautilus it will take an extra 5-6 seconds. Every subsequent time any slow launching program will be fast so long as one of the slow launching programs has been started.
Finally, not a messed up thing, but there is just needless clutter of stuff in my config files, now, since I've got KDE, Gnome, and actually a couple other DE things laying around, now. Mind you, this is all after I've already uninstalled KDE.
Edit: I thought about what I wrote and it occurred to me some of that stuff might be because of bad gtk4 config files. So I deleted them and rebooted. The theming is correct again as far as I can tell, but the slow launch stuff persists.
I think usually if you use 1 DE per user, it works out fine.
that's what I heard and that's what I tried, but gnome is automatically default with new users obviously. Its fine to just install a new desktop right on top of gnome like that? and are there any other factors I need to worry about such as display managers or anything else? thanks
My Endeavour OS has Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, bspwm and Hyprland on it. I haven't really had any problem with them.
Endeavour is interesting... however I dont think they have deepin or cutefish, the two DE's I am most interested in trying
You can always install them from Arch or AUR. I didn't just merge all the Endeavour images into one to install them.
Gnome developers had the genius idea that a session cannot be locked when GDM is not the login manager, so using GDM is basically a requirement for real-world scenarios outside VMs.
Often distributions have some sort of meta package that installs everything related to that desktop, including many applications. Better install the session package and the file manager package and go from there.
Brings back memories.
My last experiment with that was a few years ago and I thank the creator of debfoster for the help to clean the house up after.
Unless things have changed and you run perhaps a fully containerized system or mannually install just the DE without any bundled SW, you'll face DE seepage. KDE will throw new programs into the user space that will show on GNOME, getting a windows manager will probably throw conky into the system, Cinnamon will throw a few other things into the pile, and so and so forth.
My personal experience taught me that the system loads those resources for any user to access at will.
If you are looking to evaluate which DE will be the better fit for you, I'd advise trying one by one for at least a week or go for live mediums.
Back in my days this was called mental illness
wanting to is there something wrong with wanting to explore different DE's?
I haven’t had much issue installing multiple.
The biggest problem I’ve had is if you then want to uninstall one. Usually have to start over.
Something like nixos might be able to handle that much better.
Can confirm have switched around DEs quite a bit on my NixOS machine
Only concern is config files get left over, switching from pantheon to gnome caused some settings to get messed up (pantheon is based on gnome and also uses gsettings)
Though that's not a concern if you embrace it fully and do all your gnome config declaratively
For me, it's incredible how easy it is to switch DEs. 1 line to enable gnome, and 1 for GDM and you've got GNOME. Change to Cinnamon and LightDM for Cinnamon, etc. (and remember to rebuild) So easy!
Man I tried to install the DDE over the fedora workstation and it just did not look right at all. I couldn't even view any apps as the app menu was completely blurrred. Nothing look like it should have looked with deepin
Shouldn't do much if you only have 1 other desktop. For example I used Pop!_OS for years which comes with Gnome, but I MUCH prefer KDE Plasma so I had that installed the whole time and just never touched Gnome (it was still there, removing it would have broken stuff).
and it doesn't cause anything funny with conflicting packages and settings? I've read that it does
I mostly use Sway (which is Wayland based) but also have Gnome and LXDE installed. I use one of those with X11 when I need to screenshare, because I can't make that work on wayland. No real issues besides them having each others apps in their launcher menus.
Vim