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
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!
Move to silverblue/kinoite and when the urge to use another DE just rebase the OStree to the other branch - Silverblue for Gnome, Kinoite for KDE, Sericea for sway, Vauxite for xfce and there are some other not yet official branches for other DEs on Quay
I'm an ultra-noob, so those who know more please correct me.
I'm playing with Linux VMs and recently I installed Debian to check it out. When it asked what DE I wanted, I chose all of them :).
The only hard conflict (AFAIK) is the [compontent / feature responsible for loging in] (I don't know the technical term). Because each DE comes with a different one, you need to choose one.
What I found very confusing in practice is that I could see some DE apps and configuration settings from other DEs. So, unless you know what belongs to what, it's a bit of a mess (in my VERY limited experience).
The program responsible for logging in and starting your window manager is called the display manager. Sddm is the default for KDE and GDM is the default for Gnome.
Technically, you don't even need a display manager as you could login and start the window manager manually directly from the TTY. That's just mainly useful for when you break something in your display manager config though.
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?
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
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.
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,
