Nixos would do the trick. Just swap the DE in your config and BAM, magic.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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NixOS. You can change DE by editing a couple lines in your config, running sudo nixos-rebuild boot and rebooting
I agree with NixOS as a good choice for this. The most important bit for me is it cleans up really well when you switch. Every other distro I've tried tends to leave a lot of mess behind and a lot of duplicate function apps.
Just be ready to clean out your home, maybe add a new user to test them. I set up KDE then went back to gnome and it broke my cursors somehow... nbd but it's a bit annoying
Can't say I've seen that yet, but it is a good point. Your home directory might still get a little messy. I think the thought of using the config to me a user per-desktop environment you test is problem a good idea.
A Live boot USB Stick
Yeah, I can't see other options other than this or VMs being worth the trouble.
BlendOS. You can easily switch between DEs without any conflicts or dependency hell, as they're all containerised (and would therefore perform better than running them inside a full-fledged VM).
I just spent an hour trying to get this installed in a Proxmox VM. No dice. After install, it just boots to the GRUB rescue prompt. Oh well, seems like a cool idea.
I didn't know this existed. This is interesting.
that looks interesting
NixOS VM’s.
As in, build a NixOS VM that's otherwise the exact same as your current system but with a different DE enabled. nixos-rebuild build-vm
That's a really cool feature
Thanks for explaining. I've come across build-vm and I should really try it out. Rebooting just to roll back isn't fun
Well, you can roll back with a switch too; no reboot required.
The VM protects you from accidental state modification however (i.e. programs enabled by some DE by default writing their config files everwhere) and its ephemeral nature makes a few things easier.
I've had some changes where I had to logout after a switch, so this should help sometimes.
Sadly distrotest is gone, but distrosea.com is a semi-decent replacement. Doesn't seem quite what you're looking for, but may be worth a look!
This is really cool in concept, but it is SO SLOW. OMG.
Thus is the folly of small scale cloud computing, unfortunately.
It would be best to try every single one separately, otherwise you'll have dozens of programs that do the exact same thing, like file explorers.
That said, with Fedora you can list available desktop environments using the default package manager, dnf. In a terminal use the dnf group list command to list all available desktop environments:
dnf group list --available *desktop
Install the required desktop environment using the dnf install command. Ensure to prefix with the @ sign, for example:
dnf install @kde-desktop-environment
After trying the DE, you can remove it with:
dnf remove @kde-desktop-environment
Thought fully switching a desktop environment up to your login screen and all is a little more complicated and can end up bricking your system if you don't know what your doing. For those cases, you also would need to swap the system identity. Not entirely sure what was the command right...
All modern distros let you install them all and just select which one you wish to use from the login screen. You don't need NixOS or anything specifically to do this, in fact it's easier on other distros because usually nothing more than installing the packages is required, no config editing, rebuilding or even rebooting.
You will have a lot of dependencies, apps and broken themes/configs left from the other DEs.
If that's happening on your distro then try any of the modern big names and it'll be fine. Left over cruft being a problem beyond some extra disk space usage is a thing of the past.
That can't happen on my distro.
(I use NixOS, btw)
Universal Blue
They offer pretty much every DE and since it's immutable/atomic you can just easily rebase between them using their image list
This doesn't work well in practice when switching between Gnome and KDE. Both change configuration in /home, which might break theming and results in strange behavior.
Logging in with a different user for each desktop environment does prevent such issues. Or alternatively deleting the right folders in ~/.config should fix it too.
That's one way to deal with software fragmentation I suppose.
I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop and it has a dropdown list on the login screen to select DE
The better approach is to grab the most popular distros that have different DE. See how the made their DE and what is possible. Also, think about what your goals are with a DE because if you are researching it then that means you have a desire in mind or want to know what a DE could do for you.
Arco -B has the widest range of DEs and WMs at install that I've seen so far. Almost all of them are modded to have a unified control scheme, but the appearance is usually close to vanilla.
Nope. Either create a ton of live usb's or a ton of vm's