Fedora

Fedora is a family of GNU/Linux distributions offering a wide range of editions: server, classic desktops with KDE and with Gnome, atomic editions, spins that offer alternative desktop environments such as COSMIC, and labs, designed for specific use cases. This is due, to a great extent, to the variety of existing desktop environments. Options There are several options to try different desktop environments in your computer without having to reinstall the system completely: Use a Virtual Machine. While this option doesn’t compromise your daily machine, moving all your activity and data to a virtual machine requires commitment and takes a lot of disk space. Install a system in an external storage, such as a USB drive. Similar to the previous option, with worse performance. If we want to use one of the existing “Live” images we won’t be able to save our work by default. Install several desktop environments on the same machine, choosing which one to use each time. In this case we would be using our computer, applications and data with no limitations. The downside of this option is a duplication in many applications and subsistems: system settings, file manager, USB devices, sound and networks management,… and this is not very practical. Switch completely from one desktop environment to another. Same advantages as the previous option, with no duplicates. The downside is that there’s no quick and easy way to quickly go and use the previous desktop environment if we miss something: it’s all or nothing. Getting Ready This only applies to Fedora’s classic editions, and was written for Fedora 44. If you’re using Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or any other atomic desktops, this post won’t be useful to you. To simplify the text, the story goes into switching Gnome for KDE Plasma. Nevertheless, changing between any other two desktop environments is fudamentally the same. As a previous task, I personally go to check those favourite applications I want to keep using no matter what, and I try to install them using sandboxed package formats like Flatpak, AppImage, or Snap, within reason. More about this at the end of the post. Swapping the desktop environment is no joke. Regardless how many reliable and supported methods are available, things can go wrong. Follow this post under your own responsibility and ensure you have backups of your data, or your whole system, in case anything goes wrong. Temporarily Disable the Display Manager The first step is to log out from all sessions that are using the desktop environment and switch to one of the text consoles available pressing CTRL+ALT and one of the function keys (F3 usually works). The user to perform this change has to be an administrator of the machine, that is, able to use sudo. ...