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
I’ve never had trouble with package conflicts. You get duplicates for just about every built-in application (password managers/calculators/calendars/etc.) if you install all the recommends, but they should all work together as long as you don’t enable foreign PPAs and other known conflicting package sources like that.
I tried KDE a while back and it seems to add a boatload of services and tools, so when I went back to Gnome I removed leftovers for weeks; I really should’ve made Timeshift take a snapshot.
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.
That’s why I use Timeshift, snapshots only take a second to make and (if you set up the script right) will be made automatically whenever
aptis called. It’ll probably be a lot slower on non-BTRFS systems (hard links instead of snapshots) but it’s still a lot faster than basic copying.Oh thats neat. I’m assuming that can be configured for other package managers when you’re calling the apt equivalent?
Any package manager with pre install hooks should work. I know someone has written the necessary hooks for pacman, if Timeshift is in your distro’s package standard package manager I bet there’s a hook pre-written for you as well.
If there isn’t, Timeshift can also take daily/weekly/monthly/per-boot snapshots (with an optional limit for each separate type to keep). Because snapshots only track the differences, and /home is excluded by default, snapshots are generally smaller than a gigabyte or so because they only track OS updates and such. Older snapshots will grow in size as the difference between them and the current system state grows, but 9 months and an upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 to 22.10 only took up 54GB on a 1TB disk.
I like the “take a snapshot each boot” option because you can revert every boot rather than specific actions, especially when your package manager lacks the necessary hooks.
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 @[email protected] :
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md
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.
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
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.
In my experiance there can be problems, though mostly when uninstalling where the user can see random needed pieces being deleted causing failure to boot, grub rescue menus, networking or bluetooth to fail, or audio to fail. All I have personally seen or experianced.
I have also seen installing plasma on mint delete most of cinnamon and networkmanager for who knows what reason
In general usage though I’ve never had an issue using gnome, plasma, and i3 (lately sway) on a system together.
Packages are a tree with stuff like glibc at the root and stuff like your browser at the leaf nodes. Total disaster normally entails doing interesting things and create things to break your package database or removing things too far up the tree python being an obvious and funny case. Hey I just asked it to get rid of python why did it ask to remove half my system!
I’m guessing you tried to install KDE from a repo outside of mint or ubuntu because hey kubuntu is just kde and ubuntu. When you ask your pkg manager to come to a solution, tell it its ok to remove packages and insist it install something non-compatible sometimes it just fails sometimes it offers interesting solutions. For instance maybe you tried to install something call it package D that was incompatible with the packages A and B but not strictly incompatible with C. So it tells you well you asked to have D you can have C and D if you let me jettison A and B. This is when you tell it no thank you and ask it a smarter question.
You can also get interesting solutions by trying to force it to install things it failed on, on some distros by half upgrading things so you have packages that depend on different versions and then trying to upgrade one thing without finishing the upgrade, or manually installing things.
Great explination, though I’ll be clear this was a friend of mine who installed plasma through the software center provided by mint with no additional repositories added. This, after seeing me do so on another system of theirs to show them plasma, the issue could very well have been what you’ve described.
Look at what happened with steam and PopOs which when trying to install wiped the desktop environment. Although this, ide breaking the machine, was localized solely on this singular machine. I do assume it was some irronious package mismatch that this person clicked “accept” on without reading what action would be taken
The person skipped a few steps when they did something stupid where they had to pass a flag for it to remove crap in the cli too
Does synaptics or even apt take care of these things automatically during install or do you manually need to configure every app you download?
This is a great answer thanks. I always install the environments through apt or synaptics. Then one of my issues or maybe its normal, all the packages and apps comingle I feel thats where the problem lays. I want each environment to be separate and actually be their perspective environment instead of each being a mish mash of each other. Hope that makes sense. It always causes issues for me at least. Also tried separated accounts for each environment and I’m sure thats a good way, but it didn’t work probably do to permissions. Idk how to set the right permissions to keep them seperste
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.
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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 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
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Nix has intrigued me, a bit of a learning curve though. maybe i’ll dive in further
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
