I did notice that whilst the TAKING of a screenshot wasn’t as easy in KDE, that editor thing was bloody superb! Took me a day to find any way of making SIMPLE edits to images in Gnome, ended up with Gwenview which is dated but just what I wanted, simple and functional for overlaying text, adding some arrows or whatever.
But overall I am so stressed out with other crap right now, I fear I just have to go with Gnome for a while longer, at least until I have moved to a better machine that runs quick enough to get some crap done! I am definitely keen to get into KDE when i have a bit of time to learn it and set things up how I like them. The Desktop functionality is a huge draw for me, I just cant get used to not having my desktop folders any more.I know I would eventually, but it will definitely take a while, and i really don’t want to frankly, desktop always worked great for me for a well-organised place for temporary stuff i clear down as and when needed.
P.S. - That and the second biggest bugbear… Column view for files/folders. I so badly wish I could get that back.
I just read your post again and this caught my eye. To clarify, are you saying if I wanted to play around with KDE while I have Fedora Workstation(Gnome) installed, i can do that safely by creating another user and somehow installing KDE in that second user somehow? (or did I totally misunderstand?!)
Packages: dnf manages these, can always make mistakes but should just work
Config files: these are in ~/.config or other directories.
Packages are likely fine.
But config files… There are tons of apps that use random other directories, (here is a list). And there is no mechanism to remove them, they are not removed if you uninstall a package. (This is also the case on Fedora Atomic Desktops)
The configs may also be things like icons that are changed, which are not removed on uninstall.
Thats why the overcomplex workaround is to just create a new user.
So you create a new user, and install KDE on the system and use it exclusively for KDE.
The other options is using a system snapshot and having good remote backups. . .
I think the new user approach is much better.
I see a lot of recommendations for Silverblue/Kinoite, but for this instance I disagree. It requires a level of understanding of things that most users probably wont “get” right away.
For the two-users-approach, in order to avoid the mess, you do not want to log in with the other user’s desktop environment, not even accidentally.
As I see it, the steps would be:
log in with UserA into a GNOME session (as usual)
create UserB (don’t log in with it at this point)
install KDE Plasma (as suggested in this topic)
log out
at the login screen choose UserB (don’t log in yet)
in the options menu, placed in the down-right corner, choose KDE
enter password to log in.
I guess the system remembers the last used login session for each user, so that you don’t need to switch DE every time you switch users. Maybe @boredsquirrel or @hamrheadcorvette or the others could confirm.
Another annoyance would be that, AFAIK, each DE’s application launcher would be populated with the other DE’s programs. So in GNOME, I guess you would see both the Contacts and Kontact app, for example.
Hello Joey, I think before you start doing things it would be a good idea for you to start reading about:
Linux
Fedora
Gnome
KDE
because I have a strong feeling you know too little about those subjects.
I say this because of the questions you ask and the answers you give to questions from others.
You are / have been a MAC user and Apple does things differently from Linux (or vice versa).
Whatever it is you do, make sure you have a solid (external) backup of all your data because the Fedora installer, when using the auto mode for partitioning the disk, will erase everything.
Then, don’t make it complicated for yourself. Don’t start with 2 desktop environments (Gnome and KDE Plasma) at the same time. Chose 1 and place the ISO file on a USB and start in the Live-mode, test it out, use it for a while, then chose the other. Afterwards you know which one feels better for you. Install that one on your harddisk and keep reading about it.
Linux is not like Apple and not like Windows, you need to learn using it so the key word here is: read. There is much info on-line, Fedora has good info to start with. Go to https://fedoraproject.org/, hover your mouse over Help in the top right corner and a wide variety of subjects will appear.
If you really want to enjoy using Linux, and in your case Fedora, then don’t do yourself short but read, learn, cause you need to do it. There are plenty of people who just installed Linux, looked at it and had no clue what to do next, so it was back to Windows (or MAC).
