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
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
I think it was PureOS or some other distros that allowed to run DEs in containers, but I never tried this. It all boils down to the dotfiles in your home. I used to jump between DEs on the same install and it was perfectly viable, just required a little manual work.
Or I wonder about gnome boxes…
I think usually if you use 1 DE per user, it works out fine.
that’s what I heard and that’s what I tried, but gnome is automatically default with new users obviously. Its fine to just install a new desktop right on top of gnome like that? and are there any other factors I need to worry about such as display managers or anything else? thanks
Display managers usually let you choose the DE when you log in.
I BELIEVE DDE runs off lightdm. so theoretically, if I enabled lightdm, should the deepin environment finally work properly???
Your DM should be able to handle multiple DEs just install from command line and pick which DE you want from the DM.
Thanks, I tried that with deepin on fedora and it was a mess. Maybe it’s just that particular environment causing issues.
What dm are you using and what packages did you install?
As far as I know on my main account I’m running xorg but the separate account with deepin does not specify. I think default is Wayland
I tried installing several times per different guides. I’ll do my best to remember
Sudo dnf install “deepin desktop”
Sudo dnf install @deepin-desktop-environment
Sudo dnf group install “deepin desktop”
Probably one more I can’t remember
If you want DEEPIN:
Update your system:
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
Install it:
sudo dnf group install "Deepin Desktop"
And then after for change reboot your system You can do it from the terminal like:
sudo reboot
If you want GNOME try:
sudo dnf group install “GNOME Desktop Environment”
Although if:
sudo dnf group list hidden -v |grep -i gnome
returns nothing it won’t workIf your using gdm you can select DEs like:
It might be you don’t have the group for deepin so it wouldn’t be useless to try grepping for it.
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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.
I’m curious what things were “messed up”. I tend to not install more than one on my machine, but at the very least it seems like it should be a typical usecase for multiple users on the same machine to prefer different DEs when they log in. If that breaks somehow, it sounds like someone has a bug.
Some aspects of theming are messed up, like the spacers on my GTK4 drop menus are just flat gray rectangles (they look like placeholder assets). Also launching some programs after a fresh boot now take an inexplicable long time, but only the first time. So for example, if I reboot and launch Firefox or Nautilus it will take an extra 5-6 seconds. Every subsequent time any slow launching program will be fast so long as one of the slow launching programs has been started.
Finally, not a messed up thing, but there is just needless clutter of stuff in my config files, now, since I’ve got KDE, Gnome, and actually a couple other DE things laying around, now. Mind you, this is all after I’ve already uninstalled KDE.
Edit: I thought about what I wrote and it occurred to me some of that stuff might be because of bad gtk4 config files. So I deleted them and rebooted. The theming is correct again as far as I can tell, but the slow launch stuff persists.
You probably have xdg-desktop-portal-kde installed and enabled. Try installing xdg-desktop-gnome and remove the KDE one and see if it makes a difference in launch times.
Edit: I’d also reboot afterwards
YOU ARE A GENIUS!
Thank you!
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
was already installed but removingxdg-desktop-portal-kde
did the trick!I’m glad I could help.
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?
That’s a bit vague. What did you try, and what didn’t work?
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!
My Endeavour OS has Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, bspwm and Hyprland on it. I haven’t really had any problem with them.
Endeavour is interesting… however I dont think they have deepin or cutefish, the two DE’s I am most interested in trying
You can always install them from Arch or AUR. I didn’t just merge all the Endeavour images into one to install them.