Nixos would do the trick. Just swap the DE in your config and BAM, magic.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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This OS seems to have fixed all the things, based on what I constantly hear about it. Is Nix really all it's cracked up to be?
Yes and if you like lisp or FSDG compliance have a look at Guix
This is a selling point I don't often see people discussing but it has killed my need to swap distros... Possibly forever. I've been using it for a year now and have such a clean well organised config file. Version controlled, broken up into modules, with separate configurations for desktop laptop and server. Unlike any other distro, at any moment I can just hard reset to what that config describes. If I swap DEs, or python versions, or whatever else, the system no longer slowly builds up clutter and random arcane bugs and bloat. It feels like today my system is better, newer, and cleaner than when I started with it. And at any moment I can install my exact system down to every little detail on a new device. Nix is legendary for long term system maintenance.
That's what I love about it, among all the other good things everyone talks about.
Even better it's the first time I've actually felt the desire to learn to package apps that aren't available, because the nix language makes it so easy.
Of course there is definitely a learning curve, compared to other distros. Going from... at the time arch/fedora to nix felt like just as big a change as going from Windows to Linux in the first place, such a big shift in how I did everything. But definitely worth it.
Yeah but there's a learning curve for sure
Yes it is an absolute luxury to use
Have to use Ubuntu for work servers and apt is such a faff to work with compared to nix
Yes... Unless you are using stuff that's not packaged and don't know what you're doing hacking nix derivations 😹 heck of a way to learn though.
NixOS. You can change DE by editing a couple lines in your config, running sudo nixos-rebuild boot and rebooting
I agree with NixOS as a good choice for this. The most important bit for me is it cleans up really well when you switch. Every other distro I've tried tends to leave a lot of mess behind and a lot of duplicate function apps.
Just be ready to clean out your home, maybe add a new user to test them. I set up KDE then went back to gnome and it broke my cursors somehow... nbd but it's a bit annoying
Can't say I've seen that yet, but it is a good point. Your home directory might still get a little messy. I think the thought of using the config to me a user per-desktop environment you test is problem a good idea.
A Live boot USB Stick
Yeah, I can't see other options other than this or VMs being worth the trouble.
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-vm
nixos-rebuild build-vm
wow. I gotta check out nixos. That is incredible. Do you happen to know if fedora silverbue or any of the other immutable distros do this, or is this something specific to nixos?
Guix might also be able to do this but I don't think the others can.
This relies on NixOS' declarative configuration which Silverbluae and the like do not have; they are configured imperatively.
I did some research yesterday and it looks like silver blue has some rebase command that does something similar. Universal Blue is using that to make it easy to switch between DEs, netting a very similar result!
That's a really cool feature
Thanks for explaining. I've come across build-vm and I should really try it out. Rebooting just to roll back isn't fun
Well, you can roll back with a switch too; no reboot required.
The VM protects you from accidental state modification however (i.e. programs enabled by some DE by default writing their config files everwhere) and its ephemeral nature makes a few things easier.
I've had some changes where I had to logout after a switch, so this should help sometimes.
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 just spent an hour trying to get this installed in a Proxmox VM. No dice. After install, it just boots to the GRUB rescue prompt. Oh well, seems like a cool idea.
Yeah it's not in a useable state. If you do a custom partition, it installls the bootloader wrong lol
I didn't know this existed. This is interesting.
that looks interesting
Sadly distrotest is gone, but distrosea.com is a semi-decent replacement. Doesn't seem quite what you're looking for, but may be worth a look!
This is really cool in concept, but it is SO SLOW. OMG.
Thus is the folly of small scale cloud computing, unfortunately.
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 *desktop
Install the required desktop environment using the dnf install command. Ensure to prefix with the @ sign, for example:
dnf install @kde-desktop-environment
After trying the DE, you can remove it with:
dnf remove @kde-desktop-environment
Thought 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...
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)
I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop and it has a dropdown list on the login screen to select DE
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
This doesn't work well in practice when switching between Gnome and KDE. Both change configuration in /home, which might break theming and results in strange behavior.
Logging in with a different user for each desktop environment does prevent such issues. Or alternatively deleting the right folders in ~/.config should fix it too.
In that case, wouldn't it be possible to try this on any distro? Just make a new user per DE? Also, I think what they're pointing out is that you can change DE and rollback to where you were before
Installing multiple distros at the same time would cause issues because of additional software most DE's come with (image viewer, ...). But yes, it's possible to switch DE by uninstalling the desktop package group and installing another quite easily. Especially with btrfs snapshots it's simple to roll back.
Yes, it's possible to rollback with ublue but that won't roll back changes in the home directory. So if you switched from Gnome to KDE and then back to Gnome the additional configuration from KDE might conflict with Gnome (especially theming breaks easily).
That's one way to deal with software fragmentation I suppose.
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.
Arco -B has the widest range of DEs and WMs at install that I've seen so far. Almost all of them are modded to have a unified control scheme, but the appearance is usually close to vanilla.
Nope. Either create a ton of live usb's or a ton of vm's