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On 05/01/18 13:51, Richard Brown wrote: > Hi > > With all the problems I am having with Fedora on my desktop I want to > install a different desktop to test if there are similar problems to > the ones I am experiencing. I would like both installs to use the same > desktop if possible. I will probably install Ubuntu as I am familiar > with it. But before I do is there any suggestions for alternatives > please? I am considering Kubuntu to use KDE to see if Gnome is the > problem. > > The other task I want to do is to keep my home directory and share > between the 2 installs. How easy is it to do that please? Hi Richard - it's not completely clear quite what you want to do here as you've accidentally conflated at least two separate things (sorry to be so pedantic all the time but the devil is in the details!). A Desktop Environment (henceforth: "DE") is a bunch of software that together provides the GUI and related tools, widgets and so on that you interact with as a user - it sits on top of and is independent from whatever operating system distribution you happen to be running. Examples are Gnome, KDE, Awesome, Cinnamon and so on. The Arch wiki is really the go-to place for sane documentation so: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/desktop_environment Fedora and Ubuntu are entire distributions (see also Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Arch and many many others) which you can choose to run any of the usual DEs on top of - most distros tend to ship with a default DE however that is usually better integrated with the underlying system. Fedora and Ubuntu distros both ship with the Gnome DE by default currently. Kubuntu is a specific "spin" of the Ubuntu distro which is simply Ubuntu pre-configured to run the KDE DE by default. The confusion - which is entirely understandable by the way - is when people accidentally conflate the two. There is nothing stopping you for example installing multiple DEs on your existing Fedora distribution and simply choosing between them at the login screen. Fedora will happily install and run Awesome, i3, KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Blackbox, Enlightenment and no doubt many other DEs just as pretty much every other distro will: Ubuntu can run all of those DEs as well. As can SUSE, RHEL, Antergos and all the rest. If you like you can install KDE on Ubuntu - despite it shipping with Gnome - or you could run the Kubuntu distro and promptly install Gnome on it. What's the difference? There isn't one. So, to get back to your original question (which turned out to be two distinct questions) you need to decide what you want to achieve first. If you want to test different DEs - Gnome vs KDE for example - you don't want or need to switch entire distributions. That would in fact make things *worse* because then you wouldn't be testing the difference between Fedora+Gnome and Fedora+KDE at all - you'd be throwing out the consistent base (Fedora the distro) on which you'd base any testing between DEs and would actually be testing Fedora+Gnome vs Ubuntu+KDE for example. Which isn't going to work very well. Now you could test Fedora+Gnome vs Ubuntu+Gnome which *would* potentially be more useful as now you'd be testing the same DE but based on different distros. If you swap out both distro and DE at the same time you're left with apples vs oranges which makes any meaningful comparison considerably more at risk from confounding variables. Make sense? The easiest way forward is to leave the Fedora installation in place and follow these simple official instructions to install KDE alongside Gnome: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KDE You can then choose whichever DE you like at the login screen and set about comparing them. No further work is required here regarding your /home either. Optionally try other DEs as well to see if you can find and settle on one you really like and take that choice forwards - most people tend to pick their favoured DE and stick with it even as they distro hop as it provides consistency and familiarity between different systems. Switching distros obviously requires an entirely new base installation and is a much more invasive process. For once I can give some simple advice regarding keeping a persistent /home - at your level, don't even think about it. For a start this requires planning for it in advance and incorporating the strategy into your initial disk partitioning and layout schemes which you won't have done (apologies if I'm wrong about this). You'll presumably have accepted the default Fedora disk installation strategy which means you won't have a separate /home at all and the entire lot is encapsulated within LVM. Reinstalling a different distro over that whilst preserving the /home is entirely possible but seriously above the effort levels you will want to expend and is also pointless and stupid anyway. I'm sure this might be a little controversial and no doubt some greybeards will pop up on list claiming they've had the same /home partition since their first Yggdrasil installation in 1992 but such a thing has never been useful or desirable in the first place anyway. /home directories are littered with countless distro and software version specific dotfiles that will categorically clusterfsck your system when transplanted across even similar distros let alone painfully migrated across years or even decades worth of evolving code. Don't do this. Sensible people have backups (like I'm sure you have!) and migrate/version in the relevant parts of their working environment to any new system as needed whether it's a completely new distro installation on their main computer or a throwaway shell account for a quick remote job. Forget preserving /home - it's not a magic partition you want complete with all the crap, it's just your important customisations, workflow and tools/data and those *have* to be backed up and available anyway to avoid total incompetency. So if you do decide you want to completely switch out your Fedora distro to say Ubuntu or SUSE just double check your backups and then blow away the entire thing. Pull the bits you want back in from backup after the install - this has the added advantage of getting rid of all the crap as well and avoiding yet more of those pesky confounding variables that really really won't help when you're trying to triage bugs or other undesired behaviour. Apologies for yet another one of my lengthy replies but I hope it clarifies things at least a little. TL:DR - just install KDE as above first whilst keeping your Fedora installation in place. Test to see how you get on. Try other DEs as well if you like. Make sure you are properly, properly backed up (this is really rule #0). Finally, blow away your entire Fedora system if you want and reinstall with different distros (and DEs) for further testing, pulling your data in from backup. However, my money is STILL on your graphics stack + drivers + firmware being incorrectly configured, hence the gnome-shell segfaulting. Kabylake just isn't *that* new or unsupported for Linux any more. As usual, just keep asking questions if you like :] Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq