As title says. Obviously I could setup different virtual machines or spend the time and install all the DEs in one VM if it is even possible without breaking the OS. I’m wondering if there is an already made iso or something that installs all the maintained DEs for trying.
deleted by creator
Just be a little careful here. There are distro live images that Ventoy does not support. They are rare but they do exist.
NixOS VM’s.
As in, build a NixOS VM that’s otherwise the exact same as your current system but with a different DE enabled.
nixos-rebuild build-vmThat’s a really cool feature
A Live boot USB Stick
It would be best to try every single one separately, otherwise you’ll have dozens of programs that do the exact same thing, like file explorers.
That said, with Fedora you can list available desktop environments using the default package manager, dnf. In a terminal use the dnf group list command to list all available desktop environments:
dnf group list --available *desktopInstall the required desktop environment using the dnf install command. Ensure to prefix with the @ sign, for example:
dnf install @kde-desktop-environmentAfter trying the DE, you can remove it with:
dnf remove @kde-desktop-environmentThought fully switching a desktop environment up to your login screen and all is a little more complicated and can end up bricking your system if you don’t know what your doing. For those cases, you also would need to swap the system identity. Not entirely sure what was the command right…
BlendOS. You can easily switch between DEs without any conflicts or dependency hell, as they’re all containerised (and would therefore perform better than running them inside a full-fledged VM).
I didn’t know this existed. This is interesting.
that looks interesting
Universal Blue
They offer pretty much every DE and since it’s immutable/atomic you can just easily rebase between them using their image list
The better approach is to grab the most popular distros that have different DE. See how the made their DE and what is possible. Also, think about what your goals are with a DE because if you are researching it then that means you have a desire in mind or want to know what a DE could do for you.
That’s one way to deal with software fragmentation I suppose.
All modern distros let you install them all and just select which one you wish to use from the login screen. You don’t need NixOS or anything specifically to do this, in fact it’s easier on other distros because usually nothing more than installing the packages is required, no config editing, rebuilding or even rebooting.
You will have a lot of dependencies, apps and broken themes/configs left from the other DEs.
If that’s happening on your distro then try any of the modern big names and it’ll be fine. Left over cruft being a problem beyond some extra disk space usage is a thing of the past.
That can’t happen on my distro.
(I use NixOS, btw)
