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.
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
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.
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.
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.
