I have tried it on several distros before and it always causes problems because you get a million more packages intermingled with your already installed packages and sometimes you get conflicts or whatever. But it usually messes up my system. is there a safe way to have several desktops installed? or do you pretty much install a new one then remove the old one? thanks
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What a mood. Im very guilty of not making backups and ruining setups only to have to start all over.
I’m a fairly new linux user so this is bound to happen again lol.
One word: Timeshift
Yup. Ive heard timeshift is good. Now i just gotta actually use it.
Hows the experience with timeshift been when youve used it? Pretty easy to restore from?
Pretty easy, and it’s saved my bacon a handful of times. Most recently I restored from command line because I borked my display driver (legacy Nvidia user).
Aside from that instance, everything else was done through the GUI.
oh dude i never do backups each time i start over from scratch its a brand new version of linux. the only “important” files (that I know of), i sync to the cloud.
Haha i feel that man. I’m thinking of switching to Linux entirely and ditching Windows so i gotta get better at making backups otherwise its gonna be full reinstalls no stop.
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Oh thats neat. I’m assuming that can be configured for other package managers when you’re calling the apt equivalent?
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Thats really good to know. Thanks for taking the time to explain that.
Containerization!
Use either Nix (the package manager) or Distrobox.
With Distrobox, you can create a few containers, install the favoured DE in each one separated, and use the “distrobox-export -a your-DE” function.
But I don’t know how seamless it will work, you might have to read into it.
Seconded, Distrobox is the way to go.
Here’s how you can actually make it work seamlessly @Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml :
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md
I’m on Slackware, so having 2 different desktop environments and …checks notes… 5 window managers installed is the default.
I’ve never noticed any conflicts.I feel like a lot of frustration and 50% of broken installations could be avoided if people just learnt to ignore installed packages they don’t use, instead of spending valuable time to free worthless amounts of disk space.
You see, through all my trials I have learned about DE’s and display managers but nothing about window managers… maybe that’s my issue haha
For me, the only issue I have ever experienced is DEs like to force themes on you, so if I was to log into plasma, it will make the plasma theming default. This means thatvwhen I go bacl to a window manager, I have to change my theme again and oftentimes log out and log back in to ensure my theming is applied.
Install the DEs manually instead of from metapackages so ,out don’t end up with their entire software suites being installed. Additionally, probably use Debian instead of Ubuntu if you’re gonna be doing stuff like that, less fingers in the pie make for an easier tinkering experience.
In my experience the main issue are configuration conflicts not package issues. They’re usually just annoying issues not breaking issues.
Have you considered doing stupid shit and used Bedrock Linux?
It’s great, but it’s still baking
thanks, I’m currently on Debian 12 and tried the whole tasksel method and it’s really neat and all, but it still doesn’t separate all the DE’s. they are all mish mashed and intermingled with each other’s software.
I always find suggestions that this will cause trouble curious I’ve been hearing this since 2003 when it might have been at least sort of true but didn’t have trouble with it then or now. I use i3wm but I like to play with and test different environments. I presently have gnome cinnamon mate plasma sway compiz, and wayfire installed. What do you imagine this is going to somehow screw up.
the issue I’ve found is that the software that comes with each DE just all gets lumped together with every other installed DE, so there’s obviously probably conflicting software/programs. Idk how to keep each DE separate from one another, almost containerized, so when you log into Gnome, you don’t have KDE, Mate, Xfce, etc. aspects all intermingling with your Gnome environment. Idk that’s how I’ve been seeing it
Nemo is the file manager for cinnamon. Dolphin is the file manager for plasma. Although they perform the same task their executables are on different paths as are their files. You could install 10,000 packages and never find a conflicting file save literal forks of the same project which your package manager will tell you about if you install both A an B. An example would be i3 a window manager, and i3-gaps a now depreciated fork of i3 which provides, you guessed it, gaps between windows.
There is no reason to believe installing 17 different environments would conflict let alone 2. There is no need whatsoever to keep anything separate from one another nor is there any reason to believe one would interfere with another.
Thanks for the info. I always sorta assumed all the environments programs are compatible no matter which environment you’re using within your distro. i guess my gripe is the clutter. when i wanna use say Mate, i want a pure mate experience with only Mate traits, settings, apps, programs instead of all the other environment aspects being lumped in there too. just my preference I guess
There really isn’t any such thing as a “pure mate experience” for instance normal install likely contains VLC/Smplayer for multimedia, libre office for office docs, and firefox or chromium for web browsing. Not only are none of these mate apps most users probably spend most of their time using apps like these than their file manager.
Then if you look at the other mate apps. Mate Terminal is hardly the best terminal nor is Atril the best pdf viewer. Kitty is a better terminal and zathura and Okular are both better PDF readers. Pluma is a mediocre text editor.
The useful parts of an env are its settings menu, window manager, bar, and file manager. Pick one you like and then pick useful apps to go with it.
I believe you can do this (and more) with Blend OS https://blendos.co/
I have read a little bit about this interesting distro. Haven’t explored it much, though have read a ton of negative and mixed reviews. Isn’t Rhino Linux sorta similar?
They are both rolling releases. Rhino is based on Ubuntu and BlendOS is based on Arch. The difference is that Blend OS lets you install software from supported distributions (Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu) into containers. Rhino (as far as I know) out of the box doesn’t do that.
good to know, thanks. arch is out of my comfort zone lol though I have ambitions to slowly work my way into it with something easy. I used manjaro years ago and loved it. seems to have a bad rep, but I think their distro is most functional and beautiful, but again, i’m no Arch expert
How are you installing the DEs? I’ve consistently had at least 3 DEs on every machine I’ve had for the past decade and never had any issue with it. The secret is that I installed them through the package manager and don’t uninstall parts of it or anything of the sort, they’re there for when needed, I have enough disk space that it’s a non-issue.
one user per environment in terms of keeping the configs from fucking each other
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Nix has intrigued me, a bit of a learning curve though. maybe i’ll dive in further
