How to maintain two separate installs of the same app?

Issues & Assistance GNOME
1

Hey there,
I am familiar with Linux in general (most of my experience is with Debian based systems) but I am new to Arch, so feel free to ELI5. My school and an advanced maths school I attend both use Teams, but they have separate organisations set up so I have to use two separate accounts when attending online classes. This means that I have two options:

  1. Log out and log in at least twice a day when switching accounts.
    This is obviously very tedious and I do not want to do this at all.
  2. Use the Teams web app for one account and the native one for the other.
    This is what I'm currently doing and it's fine for now but what I've noticed is that even though I have a pretty respectable laptop (Legion Y540 for those wondering), the web app still feels very very laggy, whereas the native one works great (DUH!).

So, what I would like to do is maintain two installs of the Teams native app so that I can switch between the two whenever needed and both of them are actually usable.

What I think could work:
I currently have Teams installed through flatpak. I recently found out that Teams is also available through pacman, so I install this one as well. But, I am not sure if the configs from the two installs could create any conflicts (because presumably, both of them use the same directories for storing configs, please correct me if I'm wrong).

PS - If you actually read this whole thing, thank you for making it this far!

2

Hi there, welcome to the forums.

Did you try creating a new user on your pc? It is pretty simple and fast to switch between users.

I am not sure, but I don’t think it is going to work, because they might create conflicts, due to same desktop apps. Also, always try to use AUR on Garuda/ other Arch based systems, because they are usually more optimized than snap/flatpack. And you know, teams is already a really heavy application.

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3

Teams should also have multi organizations support baked in

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4

Generally, Electron-based applications will have a command-line flag for a profile directory (e.g. --profile), it’s just a case of finding out what it is.

Otherwise, there’s a crafty way to set an entirely different profile without command-line flags: override the $HOME directory.

For example,

HOME=$HOME/teamsaccount2 teams

This will create any files under the $HOME/teamsaccount2 directory and so keep the two profiles completely separated.

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