Probably a stupid question. But if I've installed KDE Dr460nized, will I be able to benefit from the work being done here without having to reinstall?
I'm curious to try out hyprland on my existing install but be able to fall back to plasma if I need to for some reason.
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Installing multiple desktop environments on top of one-another is possible, but can break things or have other unwanted consequences so we generally advise against it.
One option available to you which would allow you to keep your existing KDE installation intact while testing out another installation would be multibooting in subvolumes. You can install into new subvolumes without affecting your existing ones, and then have essentially a dual-boot setup without having to re-partition your drive, etc. An outline of how to set this up is in the Garuda wiki here:
If you wish to get rid of the extra installation at some point, it is as simple as deleting the subvolumes. Once you get the hang of it, it's a great way to test out a new installation without messing up your current setup.
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COOL thinks for the post and info. I'm always testing out new distros and it would be nice to use the entire drive for the main distro and not have to resize it to install a new distro alongside it.
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HUH, hadn't thought of using subvolumes for that. Nice benefit of that is that you can easily keep the same Home subvolume then. nice!
EDIT: oh right nvm. you're not supposed to that either, because of dotfiles I guess?
Yeah it’s pretty great to not have to hack up the drive into partitions and resize filesystems to install a new distro. Once you get the hang of it, you set up an installation in whatever time the installer takes (ten minutes?), poke around for an hour or whatever, then blow the subvolumes away when you are done if you’d like and it’s as if they were never there.
It’s true, you may break things by sharing the entire home subvolume. There are ways around this, for example you can make smaller “safer” subvolumes within the home subvolume and have each system share the smaller subvolumes.
Another approach that I do on my own systems (I find it cleaner and simpler than having tons of subvolumes) is set up a “shared” subvolume, to be mounted by all installations. Then I move some common directories (the home folders like Documents, Downloads, etc, and some config files I want shared) into that, and symlink them in the appropriate directory path for each installation. That way, no matter what installation I boot into I have all my stuff, but at the same time each installation can have its own dot files, etc.
If you are interested, I detailed a somewhat exaggerated example of this kind of setup (with thirteen different Garuda Linux installations) here:
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