I am thinking about adding Gnome shell to my current Xfce on Tumbleweed as an option to boot into.
I know there is a fair bit of cross-over between Xfce and Gnome in the form of applications but I want to minimize the duplicity of application functions (Thunderbird and Evolution? Xfburn and Brassaro? music players, etc.). At least there will be fewer than if I tried adding KDE.
At the same time I don’t want a crippled Gnome experience where nothing works, or everything will be installed piecemeal to get where could have been gotten to easier.
I was thinking of
sudo zypper install gnome-shell
but just realized that I should probably look in Yast at the Gnome pattern and see what additional items will be installed, though I suspect that would go counter to my “minimize-duplicate-application-functions” thoughts.
I know there will be a big performance hit in comparison to Xfce so afterwards I will be looking for ways to lighten the load, but that’s for another thread ;).
Do you think using
sudo zypper install gnome-shell
is the best method? or the Gnome pattern via Yast?
And a follow-up question: this system did have Gnome once before (openSUSE 13.1 or 13.2 I believe) before I moved to Tumbleweed. What is the directory where the configurations are set so I can rename (remove) it and start with a basic Gnome setup?
Or, am I just being foolish (then again, what else is new)?
With “adding Gnome to Xfce” do you mean adding Gnome DE to the system (where you have Xfce also as an installed DE), or do you mean adding Gnome things to your Xfce environment?
In the first case the same as for every DE you install: use the Pattern(s).
In the second case, I have no idea what you try to achieve.
It is the first case. I have Xfce currently installed with Tumbleweed and I want to add Gnome as an option I can select when I am logging in.
So the Pattern is the best method, but won’t that bring in a lot of extra applications that I may already have lighter versions installed as part of Xfce. I want to keep the number of applications that do the same thing down to a minimum.
Ok, that didn’t last long. Everything seems to work, and I was surprised ot see the extensions I installed previously are still here.
One last question… I did have Ubuntu on here at one time and Gnome seems to retain the setting for putting the buttons on the left side, rather than the right side. How do I change that back?
Xfce did not display this behavior so it is something that Unity did to Gnome.
It will bring in some new applications. However, there significant overlap. That is, quite a few of the Gnome applications are already on your system as part of XFCE. The won’t be installed a second time. Installing the Gnome pattern will continue to use what is already installed that is part of that pattern.