Change Desktop Environments on Linux

let's change Linux today and I say Linux because at the end of the day most people switch distros or install this this and this because they're looking to game or they're looking for work productivity you're looking for all these different things going oh well maybe this distribution has it and a lot of this stems from the desktop environment and many people go oh you can't really install multiple desktop environments and I'm like no you can I personally at my work have had vanilla arch going for more than a year and I've installed seven different desktop environments not all at the same time mind you is there some things you need to know about switching desktop environments without reinstalling everything and then also I wanted to go over what makes that up and how you can do that because I think it's really important to understand it instead of distraught hopping and installing all these different things because I'm don't do distro reviews because I think distro hopping silly I think it's for just a lack of knowledge out on the marketplace and that's why I don't really care about distributions that much I think most people distro hop just because they're looking for something that they can already get with their current distribution so with that said to me in my mind there's only two distributions I would ever even consider to do is my daily driver and that's vanilla Debian which is the granddaddy and what most of everything is based off of I'm looking at a bunt - and all those derivatives and then you have vanilla arch which you know is a pain to install but everything's kind of based off it on the arch side of things that you want all of every package ever installed and you want to be on the bleeding edge arch is usually where you're at so if you're looking for stability reliability and little older packages you're usually on Debian or a Debian based distribution and if on arch you're looking for that bleeding edge that new hotness that everything that's brand new is usually on arch but both of them typically have a huge array of packages and you can install anything you ever dreamed of installing and you can make Linux look amazing and make it look basically however you want to make it look so this video wants to go over the that making it look and feel the way you want it to because when it comes to desktop environments I've said hey look at all these different desktop environments now normally I would roll my intro here but I want to show you the desktop environments in the next 20 seconds you have KDE you have gnome you have xfce you have LX QT you have Mater Mattei you have a whole bunch of different ones out there depending on your needs those are the big ones I really want to cover in today's video because those are the ones that I consider as a serious contender you also have window managers which kinda is what I use here you have awesome and I three and a Q tile and a whole bunch of other ones out there but those don't really have any settings and not really a complete desktop experience for the end user so for this video I'm gonna touch a little bit at the end of this video about those window managers but really it's more about the desktop experience in the desktop environments that are out there and how to really switch between them so let's go over some golden rules when you're doing desktop switches and that way you have a better understanding of what really goes into it first off when you're choosing a distribution I said at the beginning of the video Archer Debian to distributions in my mind or literally all that you really should use why is that well because when you use Ubuntu or you use any of these other distributions they typically customize Linux in such a way that you can't really uninstall the desktop environment that comes with it there's some caveats to here but in general practice it's a bad idea a lot of times things get messed up because they get baked into the actual core of the distribution where when you run a vanilla Debian or a vanilla arch well first and foremost it's more of a server install and that server installed then you add the desktop environment on top of it and that means you can easily switch and swap back and forth I say easily but it definitely is a little more to it than that but that's why I say Debian or arch is really what you should be using so the first thing there is when you're choosing that distribution I think you should choose one of those two if you're really serious about using Linux as a daily driver as many of the other ones are great for let's say my mother-in-law I'd recommend using just a vanilla like Linux Mint or pop os that's great or maybe for my brother-in-law which is a big gamer I would say maybe pop OS because it just kind of has all those settings baked in but if you're really interested in a Linux desktop and you're an advanced or power user really I think you have to use either vanilla Debian or arch I say have to because you're gonna want to tinker with the look and feel of Linux you're gonna really want to dive deep and when you're switching between a whole bunch of desktop environments it's a heck of a lot easier instead of switching distributions just to uninstall a couple packages you install a couple more and that's as easy it is to switch desktop environment so let's get into that here we go so we're gonna go plasma old KDE look at that let's purge a whole bunch of stuff right so this is gonna remove pretty much all of mate so there's two things with the desktop environment and now that you have your vanilla basic install that's rock-solid and you know you can swap between a whole bunch of different desktop environments instead of just tacking on more on top of it you have the pool kits and these are a basically authentication server that runs in the background so let's say you launch google and has like a keyring of your saved passwords it needs this authentication service running and every single desktop environment has what's called a graphic authentication agent and these are called policy kits or pull kits for short and every one of them has pretty much their own independent agent that runs in the background so let's say you're on gnome it's gnome poll kit or let's say you're on KDE it's gonna be its own KDE pull kit or mate and so on and so forth almost all of them have their own policy kits and if they don't they borrow and use a package from one of these other desktop environments so you need that poll kit and that's why you can't really install like four or five desktop environments all at the same time on one system because you're gonna have all this you know a lot of these pockets fighting over each other and it causes authentication errors and other things and that's bad that's why when you go to install another desktop environment you should reboot your computer and then boot directly into it and then uninstall that old one there's another setting in here too that is kind of dependent and it's called settings Damon's in these settings Damon's or well they control like the little things like brightness or maybe the theming of your actual desktop environment all these other things that kind of go into the look and feel of the diamond is held in the settings daemon and every one of them has their own settings daemon so between the Pulkit and the settings daemon that really can cause a lot of laughs when installing multiple desktop environments so you need to be cautious or at least cognizant of this so that's when we get into window managers and window managers typically get put on top of an existing desktop environment kind of as a base to say hey I want to use this guy's poll kit and some of them don't even use the settings name and everything's just set manual for a lot of the advanced users but some of them they will even use the settings daemon daemon so for me I just use the poll kids but my current desktop right here is awesome window manager it uses mate desktop environment as it's based and mate uses the mate poll kit and it also uses the mate settings name and now the settings daemon I found that it didn't really work that well with it so I didn't use that I set everything manually and now there's certain things that happen with that so the settings name and it usually would run all the way in the background but there's some desktop environments that don't need settings Damons or it can just manually set those settings for you such as LX q t or LXDE they actually don't use a settings daemon in the background and that's why a lot of window managers will use it as a base or at least use some of its packages to set let's say its appearance such as your icons and your theme like LX appearance is probably one of the biggest packages for many windows managers out there so having said that I did on live stream here I have a mate with awesome window manager and I was like you know let's switch over to KDE which has a different poll kit and it has a different settings daemon so I installed plasma - desktop and then from plasma - desktop getting installed I went ahead and rebooted the PC booted into KDE and then I literally removed mate desktop from the system and from here I could actually do everything in KDE and then I wanted to modify the actual desktop environment further and I actually ripped out and stopped using its window manager which was a little component of that desktop environment and decided to put a three in there just to say hey I did it and I did and it was a decent experience I've still wouldn't recommend it that's why I haven't made a video about it but I just wanted to really kind of dive deep with this as far as switching the desktop environment this would be an example of switching it now if you want to go from KDE to gnome you could install gnome reboot move right into gnome and then probably strip out all those KDE packages just so you don't have this overlapping services between the poll kits and setting daemon now I've also had tragedy strike on stream as well so I remember I had Fedora KDE spin installed on this studio PC and I decided to go ahead and install a bunch of different desktop environments I would install a different one and then I went back and uninstalled KDE which was what the district when I did that it completely broke my authentication I literally would just Auto login no matter where I was and no password was ever stored so it was obviously causing all kinds of issues and I ended up having to format this system because of doing that so this is an example of what not to do and that's why I'm always like just use vanilla Debian or arch because I don't want you running into this if you swap out of that desktop environment and uninstall it what that distraught because many times if you install it from a server level and then upgrade to an actual desktop this is actually a good way to be able to disk top swap without having to reinstall a new distraught or reinstall your operating system and that's super important that's why I think this is kind of powerful now this was kind of a high-level overview of desktop environments but it's something I kind of wanted to at least try and touch base with so you could have a better understanding of how Linux is constructed and once you understand how Linux is constructed I think you'll stop getting confused with the hundreds of different desktop distros out there and just say you know what forget all that I don't need to install Ubuntu and all these other derivatives yes they look nice out of the box but I want to make Linux look and operate the way I want and this is like the foundation for that understanding your desktop environment and understanding how Linux processes things between how it looks how it feels how the windows operate if you want tile if you want floating all these different options well you have that ability and this is kind of like the foundation that you need to really have a grasp of what to do and Lennox so with that said let me know your thoughts down in the comment section and as always thank you to all my patrons without you I couldn't make videos like this one and I'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 156,510

Keywords: chris titus tech, change desktop environments on linux, linux, gnome, kde, xfce, desktop, cinnamon, linux mint, ubuntu, mate, tutorial, plasma, open source, switched to linux, how to, arch linux, kde plasma, technology, lxde, environment, debian, operating system, desktop environment (software genre), computer, desktop environment, gui, arch, gentoo, install, best linux desktop, deepin desktop environment, guide, mx linux, privacy, budgie, solus, how, to, fedora, lubuntu, ubuntu (operating system)

Id: HV954gxZzMk

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020