I have tried it on several distros before and it always causes problems because you get a million more packages intermingled with your already installed packages and sometimes you get conflicts or whatever. But it usually messes up my system. is there a safe way to have several desktops installed? or do you pretty much install a new one then remove the old one? thanks
In my experiance there can be problems, though mostly when uninstalling where the user can see random needed pieces being deleted causing failure to boot, grub rescue menus, networking or bluetooth to fail, or audio to fail. All I have personally seen or experianced.
I have also seen installing plasma on mint delete most of cinnamon and networkmanager for who knows what reason
In general usage though I’ve never had an issue using gnome, plasma, and i3 (lately sway) on a system together.
Packages are a tree with stuff like glibc at the root and stuff like your browser at the leaf nodes. Total disaster normally entails doing interesting things and create things to break your package database or removing things too far up the tree python being an obvious and funny case. Hey I just asked it to get rid of python why did it ask to remove half my system!
I’m guessing you tried to install KDE from a repo outside of mint or ubuntu because hey kubuntu is just kde and ubuntu. When you ask your pkg manager to come to a solution, tell it its ok to remove packages and insist it install something non-compatible sometimes it just fails sometimes it offers interesting solutions. For instance maybe you tried to install something call it package D that was incompatible with the packages A and B but not strictly incompatible with C. So it tells you well you asked to have D you can have C and D if you let me jettison A and B. This is when you tell it no thank you and ask it a smarter question.
You can also get interesting solutions by trying to force it to install things it failed on, on some distros by half upgrading things so you have packages that depend on different versions and then trying to upgrade one thing without finishing the upgrade, or manually installing things.
Great explination, though I’ll be clear this was a friend of mine who installed plasma through the software center provided by mint with no additional repositories added. This, after seeing me do so on another system of theirs to show them plasma, the issue could very well have been what you’ve described.
Look at what happened with steam and PopOs which when trying to install wiped the desktop environment. Although it was localized solely on this singular machine. I do assume it was some irronious package mismatch that this person clicked “accept” on without reading what action would be taken