Good day to you all, and if you are celebrating, Happy Easter!
First, I would like to say, I love Garuda. I installed the Dragonized edition on my Gaming PC which doubles as a work PC, and soon after, I installed it on my work laptop. Despite the reputation of Arch, Garuda is reliable, has never failed me (except during an update that I cancelled prematurely but was rescued by a snapshot), and is fast and easy to update.
I love the customization of KDE and have set my gaming PC to be just the right amount of bling. However, I find the bells and whistles of KDE to be a bit distracting for my work laptop and was wondering if I could install Budgie safely on garuda (and if everything would be properly updated with the garuda-update command).
I found a thread where the user wants to dual run KDE and Budgie. That is not my intention. I want to have a simple DE that runs over the reliable garuda distribution for work purposes.. I also found a couple of threads that request a Budgie download for Garuda but as cool as that may be, it seems totally unrealistic to ask.
My question is:
if I remove KDE and install Budgie as the sole Desktop Environment, would garuda-update still update the system properly
my slightly humble understanding of Linux tells me that it shouldn’t be a problem, as long as there are no two DEs that go into conflict in configuration files, but I don’t have enough experience to judge this
apologies for not testing this further, but as this is a work computer and I am away from home and have only this computer with me, I wanted to gain a bit more knowledge before changing stuff
I am not posting output because my current use of garuda is stable and I don’t have a breaking issue.
If this is too niche, I will try to personally update with any further developments.
Thank you for creating such an amazing distribution!
After researching a bit more and trying to dual run KDE and Budgie (just to see what those pesky problems would be), which led to restoring a snapshot I made prior Budgie installation (because even wifi was in conflict), I think the problem resides in KDE, which is difficult to remove, may leave orphans and one has to be careful not to delete something that is used downstream.
As I have set up a lot of peculiar settings in my current installation, I don’t want to switch distros just for the ‘simplicity’ of Budgie and garuda has been very good to me. I have decided to simplify my KDE instead.
In a different part of the internet I saw a recommendation of installing the barebones version of garuda and building to a non-supported DE from that. I would recommend that, if one has a particular favorite DE or has a good idea that they do not want to use KDE for whatever reason.
My takeaway is that KDE is a DE that leads to a particular type of commitment. It gives a great experience, it is the most customizable and aesthetically pleasing, but it is the DE that is most difficult to change without wiping the OS.
You have to make a fresh user account and log into budgie on it. If you log in on the same account as your kde main account things will break. This goes for any extra de you try and run. None are built to run multiple from the same account.
I cant say if it still true but the arch budgie pkg was broken but that was a long while ago(2024) so I would think they would have fixed it by now.
Thanks for the reply! I found that but I have some integrations that are already set up in KDE that are relevant to work. Might do the separate account for my personal computer to try different DEs for different workflows as a more isolated way to do activities.
I am marking it as a solution because it is the most reasonable way to achieve dual (or more) DEs.