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
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.
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?
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.
Oh thats neat. I’m assuming that can be configured for other package managers when you’re calling the apt equivalent?
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.
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.
