Are there any issues when installing multiple DE’s? I’d like to install KDE and XFCE. I remember I did that a while ago, XFCE crashed to death after clicking on volume control, but that was when I used to install everything available on the DVD 
It normaly shouldn’t be a problem installing several DEs on a system. After all they ar only bunches of application programs.
But I can imagine that when a specific user changes to a different DE say every day, there could be some things created in his home directory that influences othere DEs (s)he uses later.
Use different home directory to keep config files clean for each DE
On 05/03/2013 08:16 PM, vazhavandan wrote:
> Use different home directory to keep config filesclean for each DE
+1
–
dd
Can you explain how to achieve this? Because somone’s home directory is defined by the system manger (it is in /etc/passwd) and is not something that can be made dependent of the DE on uses by incident at a particular moment in time (AFAIK).
create multiple users and name them gnome,kde,xfce,lxde,E17,razor-qt etc …
In gdm or kdm choose the relevant user and relevant session .
Now each DE will have a isolated home directory.
Too much effort/disk space. This way I’d have to create a user for KDE (Gimp, videos, music, web) and another for games (XFCE), this last having an undefined size since more and more games are being ported, thus creating different partitions…?
Could someone explain which conflicts may occur, because I tested KDE with XFCE on VBox and nothing wrong happened. Of course, I didn’t install anything.
BTW I’d like to install XFCE and KDE ON SYSTEM INSTAL, if that makes any difference than installing via YasT
There is of course no problem at all when you have different users each using their DE of choice.
And saying that a DE has a home directory is not applicable. DEs do not have home directories. Users have.
II wil repeat what I said
But I can imagine that when a specific user changes to a different DE say every day, there could be some things created in his home directory that influences othere DEs (s)he uses later.
And I think it is rather clear that I talk about one user only that uses multi DEs in sequence.
I will stress again, that it shouldn’t happen. But I will not be surprised if a bug will show here because I guess that DE developers do not test extensive their own desktop against all other desktops in mixed usage. So when your experiences are positive, that is fine.
There is no difference. The same mechanism is used (zypper/YaST).
You can add further DEs by going into YaST > Software > Software Management and then choosing Patterns from th View button. Scroll down and there are they. And there is a zypper equivalent when you know the name of the pattern.
Amarildojr,
Ever since 11.2 I’ve had a KDE & XCFE & have had absolutely no problems.
Vaz,
That’s interesting I’ll have to try that. I’m curious when we go from one release to the next do you carry say kdehome & xcfehome over or do you backup each & do a clean install? Then add them in that new install?
On 05/03/2013 09:36 PM, amarildojr wrote:
> Could someone explain which conflicts may occur
it has been a few years since i had several DE’s all available to my
(one) user, so maybe things are different now…but, as i recall
changing sound settings in one DE might or might not affect the
settings in another DE…whether you wanted them to be changed in all
DEs or only in one–it was impossible to choose.
i guess there were other little unexpected crossovers causing
irritations–but truthfully i don’t recall any of the others (i’ve
not had more than one DE in any single user since 2010, at least.
–
dd
Some times i carry the users and sometimes i don’t. I am GNOME user and carry the GNOME “home”. The other homes are created when i play around with E17,razor,icewm, etc …
When you carry “home”, all the “homes” under /home/… get carried 
I have KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE and RazorQt installed. All operational and functional.
openSUSE is designed to be able to do this, so if it doesn’t work like expected, get the cause and report a bug.
I can’t imagine a situation where multiple homedirs for one and the same user would come in handy. IMHO it would mean that data belonging to one actual user would be spread through multiple homedirs. OK for testing, not for production.
I have xfce and kde installed and working.
I use xfce on an every day basis because it is quicker in rendering 3d illusrations
but I always keep kde because I am using kde applications also in xfce.
I record my guitar tracks on Audacity and I use Gmixer so I’m able to hear myself. After one day of use, XFCE crashed whenever I tried to open the volume control. I’ll try on a Vmachine beforehand.
I have been installing KDE, XFCE, Gnome and LXDE since opensuse 11.4. I mostly use KDE, but occasionally login to the others just to see what they are up to.
I have not run into serious problem.
I think when I login to XFCE, I sometime see two volume control icons.
When I check the application menu in KDE, it sometimes turns out to be the XFCE menu. To fix that, I have to logout, then remove “/var/tmp/kdecache=$USER” (from a failsafe login). That fixes it for KDE.
No serious problems, though.
My current preference is to stick to KDE as my normal user account, and login (to Gnome, for example) as a different user.
That exactly my problem. I guarantee if you click some of them (Click both to make sure) your display manager will crash (or at least I think), only “service xdm restart” to solve it.
On 05/05/2013 03:16 AM, nrickert wrote:
> My current preference is to stick to KDE as my normal user account, and
> login (to Gnome, for example) as a different user.
same…except my alternative to KDE is LXDE, which i seldom
use…but, have not once used both DEs as the same user…so, no
cross-talk…
–
dd
I run KDE & Gnome/Cinnamon concurrently, logged in as the same user, with no problems.