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?
Typically your display manager lets you choose which environment you want from a dropdown menu. It’s responsible for helping you login and taking you to the desktop.
And you can have multiple login screens if you like. I’m not sure why I would typically do this.
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
openSUSE pre-installs IceWM, for example, even if you select a full-fledged DE during setup, so that if your proper DE should ever break, you still have a (very minimal) GUI to do your troubleshooting in.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
Typically your display manager lets you choose which environment you want from a dropdown menu. It’s responsible for helping you login and taking you to the desktop.
And you can have multiple login screens if you like. I’m not sure why I would typically do this.
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
openSUSE pre-installs IceWM, for example, even if you select a full-fledged DE during setup, so that if your proper DE should ever break, you still have a (very minimal) GUI to do your troubleshooting in.
That’s pretty cool! My immediate reaction to hearing “minimal backup DE for troubleshooting” is wondering why that isn’t far more common
typically you get a dropdown at the login screen :)
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.
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 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.
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.