I have tried it on several distros before and it always causes problems because you get a million more packages intermingled with your already installed packages and sometimes you get conflicts or whatever. But it usually messes up my system. is there a safe way to have several desktops installed? or do you pretty much install a new one then remove the old one? thanks

  • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    the issue I’ve found is that the software that comes with each DE just all gets lumped together with every other installed DE, so there’s obviously probably conflicting software/programs. Idk how to keep each DE separate from one another, almost containerized, so when you log into Gnome, you don’t have KDE, Mate, Xfce, etc. aspects all intermingling with your Gnome environment. Idk that’s how I’ve been seeing it

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nemo is the file manager for cinnamon. Dolphin is the file manager for plasma. Although they perform the same task their executables are on different paths as are their files. You could install 10,000 packages and never find a conflicting file save literal forks of the same project which your package manager will tell you about if you install both A an B. An example would be i3 a window manager, and i3-gaps a now depreciated fork of i3 which provides, you guessed it, gaps between windows.

      There is no reason to believe installing 17 different environments would conflict let alone 2. There is no need whatsoever to keep anything separate from one another nor is there any reason to believe one would interfere with another.

      • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for the info. I always sorta assumed all the environments programs are compatible no matter which environment you’re using within your distro. i guess my gripe is the clutter. when i wanna use say Mate, i want a pure mate experience with only Mate traits, settings, apps, programs instead of all the other environment aspects being lumped in there too. just my preference I guess