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submitted 1 year ago by Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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

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[-] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I always find suggestions that this will cause trouble curious I've been hearing this since 2003 when it might have been at least sort of true but didn't have trouble with it then or now. I use i3wm but I like to play with and test different environments. I presently have gnome cinnamon mate plasma sway compiz, and wayfire installed. What do you imagine this is going to somehow screw up.

[-] sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

In my experiance there can be problems, though mostly when uninstalling where the user can see random needed pieces being deleted causing failure to boot, grub rescue menus, networking or bluetooth to fail, or audio to fail. All I have personally seen or experianced.

I have also seen installing plasma on mint delete most of cinnamon and networkmanager for who knows what reason

In general usage though I've never had an issue using gnome, plasma, and i3 (lately sway) on a system together.

[-] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Packages are a tree with stuff like glibc at the root and stuff like your browser at the leaf nodes. Total disaster normally entails doing interesting things and create things to break your package database or removing things too far up the tree python being an obvious and funny case. Hey I just asked it to get rid of python why did it ask to remove half my system!

I'm guessing you tried to install KDE from a repo outside of mint or ubuntu because hey kubuntu is just kde and ubuntu. When you ask your pkg manager to come to a solution, tell it its ok to remove packages and insist it install something non-compatible sometimes it just fails sometimes it offers interesting solutions. For instance maybe you tried to install something call it package D that was incompatible with the packages A and B but not strictly incompatible with C. So it tells you well you asked to have D you can have C and D if you let me jettison A and B. This is when you tell it no thank you and ask it a smarter question.

You can also get interesting solutions by trying to force it to install things it failed on, on some distros by half upgrading things so you have packages that depend on different versions and then trying to upgrade one thing without finishing the upgrade, or manually installing things.

[-] Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This is a great answer thanks. I always install the environments through apt or synaptics. Then one of my issues or maybe its normal, all the packages and apps comingle I feel thats where the problem lays. I want each environment to be separate and actually be their perspective environment instead of each being a mish mash of each other. Hope that makes sense. It always causes issues for me at least. Also tried separated accounts for each environment and I'm sure thats a good way, but it didn't work probably do to permissions. Idk how to set the right permissions to keep them seperste

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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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