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 have many DE’s installed right now and I never encountered any problems because of it, these issues sound really bizarre. With the cinnamon thing it sounds like cinnamon mangles something while running, but you would still have this problem if you only ever installed cinnamon, so… ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
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.
They’re making it sound worse than it is, in my opinion.
The problem is that it depends on which DEs you mix and match. Some DEs might do catastrophically bad things for other DEs, whereas others don’t cause any problems.
It’s not. Its actually always been like that. Like I said, this kinds of problems are odd and rare. The real issue is that the most help you’d get from the devs teams is a shrug, as it is an unsupported use case. I actually do have both gtk and qt libraries running and they work nicely together.
This is so wrong. Especially the assumption that almost no one would want to have more than 1 DE installed.
Most DEs have their own configuration which don’t conflict.
If the maintainer of a distribution has their shit together library incompatibility is no issue. Even on Gentoo you have to ignore everything portage is trying to tell you before you get in trouble.
In the past I even ran two DEs at the same time, sort of. You could start an xfce-panel while using enlightment or good old classic windowmaker.
Later I used Gnome and running my own fork of dwm in a nested Xserver. With wayland this option hasn’t gone thanks to Xwayland.
If systemd is correctly set up for it, you get a different seat for every DE, no matter if some seats are hosting the same DE or a different one. I am not sure what will happen if you have several graphical logins with the same user, never tried it.
I got an underpowered gaming laptop I use lxqt when running heavier things, plasma the rest of the time, biggest issue I’ve found is lxqt dirtied up the desktop with home/trash/documents links
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 have many DE’s installed right now and I never encountered any problems because of it, these issues sound really bizarre. With the cinnamon thing it sounds like cinnamon mangles something while running, but you would still have this problem if you only ever installed cinnamon, so… ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
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.
They’re making it sound worse than it is, in my opinion.
The problem is that it depends on which DEs you mix and match. Some DEs might do catastrophically bad things for other DEs, whereas others don’t cause any problems.
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It’s not. Its actually always been like that. Like I said, this kinds of problems are odd and rare. The real issue is that the most help you’d get from the devs teams is a shrug, as it is an unsupported use case. I actually do have both gtk and qt libraries running and they work nicely together.
This is so wrong. Especially the assumption that almost no one would want to have more than 1 DE installed.
Most DEs have their own configuration which don’t conflict.
If the maintainer of a distribution has their shit together library incompatibility is no issue. Even on Gentoo you have to ignore everything portage is trying to tell you before you get in trouble.
In the past I even ran two DEs at the same time, sort of. You could start an xfce-panel while using enlightment or good old classic windowmaker.
Later I used Gnome and running my own fork of dwm in a nested Xserver. With wayland this option hasn’t gone thanks to Xwayland.
If systemd is correctly set up for it, you get a different seat for every DE, no matter if some seats are hosting the same DE or a different one. I am not sure what will happen if you have several graphical logins with the same user, never tried it.
I am not so sure about this. Over the years this is first I’ve even heard of the concept
I got an underpowered gaming laptop I use lxqt when running heavier things, plasma the rest of the time, biggest issue I’ve found is lxqt dirtied up the desktop with home/trash/documents links