Hi,
I would like to know if there is a guide on how to transition from KDE to Cosmic? A guide that would explaining in depth how to clean KDE and install Cosmic.
Thanks
If you not want to reinstall the whole system you have to install the second DE first; in your case cosmic.
Check if everything works and after that you can remove the KDE desktop.
COSIMC installs and uninstalls very cleanly. One very nice thing they do is run COSMIC with its own dconf profile, so none of its changes affects Gnome or KDE.
I wish KDE would also use its own dconf profile so that it wouldn’t mess with Gnome…
KDE Plasma doesn’t use dconf at all, so that’s not an option.
It does, for things like seting the icon themes, GTK themes, cursor themes, etc. When you go from Gnome to Plasma, KDE updates all of those things to match Plasma’s intended experience. But the problem is, that if you go back to Gnome, you end up with a franken-Gnome-Plasma where you are obviously running Gnome, but there’s all this KDE theming applied.
Meanwhile, on COSMIC, they set a custom DCONF_PROFILE to seperate the changes/. It seems to make its changes to ~/.config/dconf/cosmic rather than ~/.config/dconf/user. Also, when it changes ~/.config/gtk-x.0, it puts its custom stuff in cosmic subdirectories.
It’s something I would really like to see Plasma adopt. The reality is that I am extremely adverse to giving Plasma chances because I know it will mess up my install to the point of me nuking my home to fix everything (due to the aforementioned dconf changes as well as the tweaks it makes all over). But I can switch to and from COSMIC without it affecting my environment at all (and it also has a very sane handling of configuration files, all under ~/.config/cosmic).
This happens because we do not use dconf. We write out plain GTK configuration INI files.
1 Like
The thing I don’t understand is when you opt for KDE Plasma you opt for QT applications because, despite it is not mandatory, it makes sense. Cosmic is a sort of fork from Gnome then it is meant to run GTK applications. So lets say you uninstall Plasma and it does remove only the desktop (I don’t believe it goes that way) to replace it with Cosmic, will you run QT applications or will you pick GTK alternatives when possible? Does it make sense? And is it worth it instead of simply reinstalling Fedora with Cosmic?
Thanks for the feedback everyone..
So let me see if I understand this correctly.
- If I install Cosmic on top of what I already have, there are no consequences and I can uninstall Cosmic easy and I will have a choice to switch between KDE or Cosmic for a user.
- Trying to uninstall KDE is currently very complicated and could mess up my entire workstation to the point where I may have to consider reinstalling FEDORA completely
Are the two points above accurate? Does it summarize well the situation?
Uninstalling KDE won’t break your system. It’s just that KDE touches a lot of configuration files in your home and they aren’t all neatly organized, its had a long history.
It’s just that for me, I’m very peculiar about my system. I like it feeling clean. For me, reinstalling is not hard and is kinda fun. So I take that route rather than undoing the changes Plasma makes.
OK.. I personally can’t do that (reinstall from scratch), at least not right now. I have everything configured with development tools, access to NAS drives, my configuration is kind of long and reinstalling would mean a few hours of redoing everything.. Perhaps one day I would need to write a bash script or python script to get myself setup faster..
Cosmic DE is still in beta so perhaps I will wait. I still like KDE but I can see advantages to Cosmic since it is maintained by System 76 and the development may be faster. I guess time will tell. For now I would just like to try it out.
The configuration files that KDE touches in my home directory, is there a list of those somewhere of what KDE needs or touches?
I use Virtual machine Manager to install a virtual environment and run the additional system there. This way you can anytime remove it without affecting your dev. environment.
Indeed, I often build VMs to try out new things. Perhaps I should do that before I commit to installing Cosmic DE but either way, it will only go RTM next year so I’ll wait.