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
What do you mean separate them from each other?
keeping them all from sharing the same files and configs and interfering with each other
Pretty much, yes but they will interfere in few ways:
- themes setup can get messy at times, but you should be able to easy override the settings
- file associations can be inappropriate
- you’ll have varoius of app suits installed and app menus will have them all
man yoiu would think there’s an easy way to keep the DE’s seperate from one another to avoid any conflictions. without freaking VM damnit lol
I think it was PureOS or some other distros that allowed to run DEs in containers, but I never tried this. It all boils down to the dotfiles in your home. I used to jump between DEs on the same install and it was perfectly viable, just required a little manual work.
Or I wonder about gnome boxes…
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…
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.
Thanks, but how does one utilize or even explore other DEs within a distro without messing things up? is it just not possible or am I going about it wrong?
I’ve seen advice before that creating a new user account and using that to log into multiple DEs is an option.
Tried that but didn’t work. Maybethere’s specific tweaks I have to make first?
That’s a bit vague. What did you try, and what didn’t work?
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.
You probably have xdg-desktop-portal-kde installed and enabled. Try installing xdg-desktop-gnome and remove the KDE one and see if it makes a difference in launch times.
Edit: I’d also reboot afterwards
YOU ARE A GENIUS!
Thank you!
xdg-desktop-portal-gnomewas already installed but removingxdg-desktop-portal-kdedid the trick!I’m glad I could help.
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.
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
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
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.
Your DM should be able to handle multiple DEs just install from command line and pick which DE you want from the DM.
Thanks, I tried that with deepin on fedora and it was a mess. Maybe it’s just that particular environment causing issues.
What dm are you using and what packages did you install?
As far as I know on my main account I’m running xorg but the separate account with deepin does not specify. I think default is Wayland
I tried installing several times per different guides. I’ll do my best to remember
Sudo dnf install “deepin desktop”
Sudo dnf install @deepin-desktop-environment
Sudo dnf group install “deepin desktop”
Probably one more I can’t remember
If you want DEEPIN:
Update your system:
sudo dnf upgrade --refreshInstall it:
sudo dnf group install "Deepin Desktop"And then after for change reboot your system You can do it from the terminal like:
sudo rebootIf you want GNOME try:
sudo dnf group install “GNOME Desktop Environment”Although if:
sudo dnf group list hidden -v |grep -i gnomereturns nothing it won’t workIf your using gdm you can select DEs like:
It might be you don’t have the group for deepin so it wouldn’t be useless to try grepping for it.
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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!
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.
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
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
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Display managers usually let you choose the DE when you log in.
I BELIEVE DDE runs off lightdm. so theoretically, if I enabled lightdm, should the deepin environment finally work properly???
I am using SDDM (from KDE) for two separate accounts - one for awesome and one for KDE.
