Running Plasma instead of Gnome for the first time in years
Trying Plasma for a bit to see how green the grass is as a longtime Gnome user. The last time I ran Plasma on my main desktop was version 5.11, I think? It's been a while...
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Takes literally minutes to try with 0 install and no risk for your data : https://distrosea.com/start/kubuntu-24.10-default/
I'm not saying you should enjoy it (even though I do, Debian stable with Plasma for a while now) but it's so convenient to give any distribution with any desktop environment a try that IMHO it's wrong not to spend few minutes and see what you might be missing.
Fedora/dnf makes installing additional desktops super easy, also with no risk to data. To hijack your comment a bit:
To install Plasma: sudo dnf install @kde-desktop
Logout and log into the Plasma session to use it.
To rollback, get the transaction ID of the above: dnf history list
And then rollback: sudo dnf history rollback <ID>
If Gnome's fonts/icons don't revert, install and open gnome-tweaks and reset settings.
I think generally installing another DE on top of an existing one (assuming you already had one) is not recommended, as they might use some of the same config files and mess them up for each other.
This is the first time I've heard of this, and I pretty much always have more than one DE installed and have never run into issues. Assuming you're using a display manager (SDDM, LightDM, etc.), it should handle loading whichever graphical session at the time of login properly.
edit: For clarity, what do you mean by "installing another DE *on top * of an existing one"--like kludging two DEs together in the same X/Wayland session? If so, that sounds like a horrible mistake that lead to that happening.
I mean in a way where you'd get 2 different X/Wayland sessions to select in your login manager.
I have also never run into issues doing this, just have always been told it's a bad idea.
eh. only vaguely.
basically, there might be some conflicts, such as a different icon theme being selected, but for the most part, things are fine - and most distros, uninstall is straightforward.
one more significant issue you might run into is display manager changes. Gnome may not always play nicely with a kde display manager, and vice versa, regarding sleep, lock, etc. however, i think all of those issues are pretty much fixed these days.
Be free! Install all the DEs/WMs your heart desires.
Regarding the multiple entries for X and Wayland versions of a particular DE: for the most part, I think xwayland has solved this, but as always--for better or worse--you have the freedom to go either way.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
