genuinely curious since I’ve never tried or even considered it. What happens when you have multiple desktops installed, and assuming it doesn’t cause issues why would a person want to do that?
There’s no added value to having multiple desktop environments, so almost no one would want to. A lot of applications use DE sensitive configurations and there’s potential for conflicts as well as libraries incompatibility. Which can result on paradoxical and bizarre behavior from some graphical apps. It’s odd that it happens but it’s also not something devs plan or account for, so they aren’t even considered bugs. You don’t install multiple DEs at the same time unless you’re purposefully trying to break something or you don’t know better.
The only use case currently is choosing between a DE with X or one with Wayland. But even that one could fuck your system.
For example, opening cinnamon experimental Wayland makes all my flatpaks stop working until reboot. Why? I don’t know, nobody knows. But if I keep using Wayland after reboot they work. If I change to regular cinnamon, they break again until reboot, when they get fixed as long as I keep using regular cinnamon. It just be like that.
I don’t use linux on desktop anymore but that seems like a major step backwards from 10 years ago where your worst worry for running multiple DEs was the bloat from having to run GTK and QT in a mixed environment.
You can choose on the login screen, works well, but it gets confusing if the whole Desktop gets installed: example GNOME comes with gnome-terminal even if there is already xterm or KDE Konsole on the system
I love how I can just casually uninstall the entire desktop and install a new one in a few minutes.
Or I can be a complete madman and keep both.
genuinely curious since I’ve never tried or even considered it. What happens when you have multiple desktops installed, and assuming it doesn’t cause issues why would a person want to do that?
There’s no added value to having multiple desktop environments, so almost no one would want to. A lot of applications use DE sensitive configurations and there’s potential for conflicts as well as libraries incompatibility. Which can result on paradoxical and bizarre behavior from some graphical apps. It’s odd that it happens but it’s also not something devs plan or account for, so they aren’t even considered bugs. You don’t install multiple DEs at the same time unless you’re purposefully trying to break something or you don’t know better.
The only use case currently is choosing between a DE with X or one with Wayland. But even that one could fuck your system.
For example, opening cinnamon experimental Wayland makes all my flatpaks stop working until reboot. Why? I don’t know, nobody knows. But if I keep using Wayland after reboot they work. If I change to regular cinnamon, they break again until reboot, when they get fixed as long as I keep using regular cinnamon. It just be like that.
I don’t use linux on desktop anymore but that seems like a major step backwards from 10 years ago where your worst worry for running multiple DEs was the bloat from having to run GTK and QT in a mixed environment.
You can choose on the login screen, works well, but it gets confusing if the whole Desktop gets installed: example GNOME comes with gnome-terminal even if there is already xterm or KDE Konsole on the system