Is it just me or is every new distro just a base with a different DE? I started to notice this a few years back but not sure if it was my imagination or something developers starting doing because it was easier to ship the DE as “the OS” than it was to instruct users on how to switch to their DE.
Repositories and package versioning are also extremely important in ways newbies don’t realize yet. There’s a significant variety between using Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS or Kali. They are all Debian based using apt but they are all decidedly entirely different systems with completely different purposes and uses.
Fedora also comes with a dozen different DEs prepackaged and installable with a single, simple command. Each user just can select and change their own desktop with a menu selection on the login screen
That’s not usually the problem. Usually you can generally do this on any distro, even ones that have a higher level of integration with their DE.
The problem is more likely to be issues caused by overlapping configurations and base libraries that can cause weird issues if they aren’t swapped out or kept default. If they aren’t default and are managed by the package manager, usually the package manager will mark it as modified and often won’t touch it unless you purge the configurations. Some will ask and some will straight up nuke em.
To me the problem is actually removing the old one. You can easily uninstall gnome, but it will leave behind config files and various data. It’s less clean.
Also, there’s an overlap in the libraries required by DEs, so you should use the “replace” option in you package manager (if it has one) to let o t figure out the best way to uninstall one and install the other.
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Is it just me or is every new distro just a base with a different DE? I started to notice this a few years back but not sure if it was my imagination or something developers starting doing because it was easier to ship the DE as “the OS” than it was to instruct users on how to switch to their DE.
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Repositories and package versioning are also extremely important in ways newbies don’t realize yet. There’s a significant variety between using Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS or Kali. They are all Debian based using apt but they are all decidedly entirely different systems with completely different purposes and uses.
They could be using different package managers or different repos
I think the default setting matters, if there is any. Looking at Gentoo.
Fun aside, I think Fedora might be a good choice, because Gnome is easy and polished!
Fedora also comes with a dozen different DEs prepackaged and installable with a single, simple command. Each user just can select and change their own desktop with a menu selection on the login screen
Are there (sizeable) distros that does not allow you to install multiple DE’s and change between them?
That’s not usually the problem. Usually you can generally do this on any distro, even ones that have a higher level of integration with their DE.
The problem is more likely to be issues caused by overlapping configurations and base libraries that can cause weird issues if they aren’t swapped out or kept default. If they aren’t default and are managed by the package manager, usually the package manager will mark it as modified and often won’t touch it unless you purge the configurations. Some will ask and some will straight up nuke em.
To me the problem is actually removing the old one. You can easily uninstall gnome, but it will leave behind config files and various data. It’s less clean.
Also, there’s an overlap in the libraries required by DEs, so you should use the “replace” option in you package manager (if it has one) to let o t figure out the best way to uninstall one and install the other.
That’s a problem with the package manager
Not entirely, for example you don’t expect the package manager to remove the gnome folder from the .local of every user
AFAIK Fedora comes with Gnome and KDE, both in Wayland and X11 version, out of the box, and you can just select one when logging in.
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