[Atomic Desktops] Documentation encourages to rebase to different desktops but it's actually kind of broken

Ask Fedora
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We can read the following on this page:

Additionally, you can choose to rebase to a different variant of Fedora Atomic, like for example Fedora Kinoite. Fedora Kinoite is similar to Fedora Silverblue, except for the fact that it uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment instead of the default GNOME desktop environment.

What this means is, you can rebase to Fedora Kinoite to try it out, without ever touching your current system. Because the two system images are isolated from eachother, the two desktop environments will never be installed at the same time. All of your flatpak apps and /home files will stay persistent between rebases. Same applies for testing out the bleeding-edge version of Fedora Silverblue, which is Rawhide.

So I was curious and decided to try this out (in a VM) and while this works, booting back into Silverblue after rebasing to Kinoite actually messed a number of things up. Nautilus directory icons have changed/are broken, window titlebars have changed with a new icon and minimize/maximize buttons, etc… and who knows what else.

So, although the base images are isolated between the two deployments, the desktops still share a number of things and step into each other’s toes. Maybe the documentation should be updated to not encourage people to do this? It seems like the end result is not what people would expect after reading the documentation.

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We are currently in the process of unifying the documentation for all variants of Atomic Desktops into one and will correct this.

Do you think we should remove the entire section or leave it in and write a warning or note that this leads to unintended consequences and people should do it at their own risk?

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How about leaving it in but recommend creating a new user for each DE to avoid conflicts.

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Sounds reasonable. We will test this approach and if it works as expected, we will include the recommendation.

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I found that switching between SIlverblue and Cosmic Atomic is seamless. COSMIC sets a different DCONF_PROFILE so that all DCONF changes it makes to is only applied while in COSMIC.

Rebasing between Silverblue and Kinoite would be more seamless if KDE used its own DCONF_PROFILE rather than overwriting Gnome’s.

Source

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That’s interesting. This should be reported upstream to KDE.

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I created a new user in Silverblue and can confirm the Nautilus anomalies are not to be seen there. Though I can’t be sure this is enough to avoid all issues as other shared places may still conflict (such as /etc/). At one point, I also remember seeing a ‘KDE Platform’ update in the Software application in Silverblue which I definitely did not expect to see. Not sure how this one got over there.

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That’s normal. It means you had a a flatpak installed that used the KDE Runtime.

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oh thank you, I did install VLC as part of my testing so that may just be it.