i heard about that. sadly my gpu is so old the latest driver that supports it is the 470 driver

keepassxc’s autotype

also, nvidia

first of all

I mean no malice towards you and hope this doesn’t seem aggressive or angry.

don’t worry, that’s not at all how you came across. different points of view, that’s all

anyway, i’m not going to have the energy to reply to this point by point. i will say that i might be biased for being a total linux nerd, so things might appear easier to me than they actually are (even when i take that very fact into account, i’m sure there’s an xkcd for that). but my main point still stands: having multiple DEs installed is a supported configuration in most linux distributions. it’s not a hack or a fringe corner case, even if it might not be recommended for beginner or even intermediate users.

there’s still one thing in your comment that confuses me, though

Maybe forgetting which text editor worked best and seeing a dozen in the application launcher and start searching for the right one

don’t you just use the default one? maybe you like a specific text editor and then you’ll need to change your defaults, but you wouldn’t need to that for every single case

chill

except ubuntu isn’t a desktop-only distro

you might also not be considering corporate workstation in an intranet

it’s also a microkernel, double ew

some nuisances are not so ignorable

that’s subjective, so i’m not going to question your preferences

however, i have both gnome and plasma installed in all my systems and there are some things i’d like to point out from my experience

having duplicate apps all over the place, each with their own settings, so if you forget which one you are using, you might find yourself spending more time in settings than desire

the defaults are DE-specific, so usually you won’t need to think about this, as gnome defaults to gnome apps and plasma defaults to kde apps. it’s not common for something like gnome’s file browser to open pdfs in okular or vice-versa – though it can happen sometimes

the one time this was a problem to me was when, for a while, opening the directory containing a downloaded file in firefox while running plasma would open nautilus instead of dolphin. but then it got fixed on its own

i’m not saying problems can’t happen with that system, just that they don’t happen all the time for everything

switching DE’s can cause browsers to log you out of everything

i have never seen that happen. the closest i got to this was getting kicked from slack because i forgot the keyring password

then there’s the fact that some use gtk and some use qt so title bar buttons and program menu’s can become confusing and ununified

but that doesn’t have much to do with different DEs being installed, does it? the toolkit choice is entirely up to the application

can these things be ignored? sure, some people can. some cannot, such as people with ADHD for example

not to invalidate anyone’s experience with adhd, but, for the record, i have adhd and this has never been an issue to me

my point is: having multiple DEs installed is pretty common and fully well supported. nearly every single session manager supports it (the only one i can think of that doesn’t support that is xdm). there are some small issues that crop up from time to time which might put you off from doing it (which is fine), but this is not some crazy kind of fringe unsupported configuration

and you can uninstall everything from the other DE anyway, so there’s literally no problem about trying it out

debian is boring as hell and that’s why i love it

debian updates usually go pretty smooth in my personal experience. last time i had an annoying problem with the nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was an exception (i had no such problem in previous updates) and i think it was my fault

unless they have stable instead of bookworm on their sources.list

i made a spreadsheet of debian release dates, graphed the days between releases and calculated a probable release date based on last release date + average days between releases* +/- 1 std deviation

if i remember correctly, bookworm was within my predicted range (apr-aug 2023, i think) and we’re now fully within trixie’s predicted range

*before etch (4.0), release intervals varied wildly, so I don’t take those into consideration

installing two DE’s can and will cause a lot of problems.

more like small nuisances that can be easily ignored

that installing each DE under it’s own user can prevent the majority of these problems

what? DEs are usually installed system-wide, i’ve never heard of an user-local installation of plasma or gnome

figma balls

just updated to it in opensuse and it’s pretty solid, but wifi doesn’t work for some reason. it can see the networks but it never connects

amazing. it looks like a nuclear meltdown

to be fair, I understand the frustration and i myself hate linux sometimes too. i just wish they’d communicate they’re asking for help

main ssd with debian stable: a single partition for the system + swap

secondary harddrive: an opensuse, a debian testing, and a freebsd partition + shared data partition

debian bc i want a rock solid system that i don’t have to worry about maintaining and i don’t give a fuck about the most recent versions of stuff

to the unavoidable “it’s been 15 years” comments: 15-year-old x11 was a piece of shit. the difference is that we had no alternative so we had to put up with it

i’d usually agree, but in this case, it feels like a cost-cutting measure. webdevs are cheaper and more available, so it’s cheaper for them to just rewrite the installer in electron than pay more expensive desktop developers to maintain their existing installer