No DE install help, what comes with it, what else do I need?

General system Newbie
1

Hey, so maybe not strictly a newbie question as I have been using Endeavour for a little while, but not in any great depth so here goes:

When I first installed I selected KDE, which is actually pretty great, and there is a lot of utility there, but there are some things that bug me and some thing I would prefer to do myself. So with that in mind I installed Hyprland and it’s great. I use Yabai on my work Mac, and tried out bspwm on Ubuntu before moving to EOS so I like tiling for the most part.

But now that I am more enlightened, I have realised I have not done a good job of maintaining my installed packages or even listing the ones I need vs. want. To me I feel like having a DE installed as well as Hyprland is a good idea, as if I bust my config I can still go in a fix stuff somehow.

So I was wondering:

  • If I reinstall is KDE still a good option? I know I can keep my home directory, so that should be fine, but maybe KDE is overkill for a bail out option?
  • What is installed when you choose the no DE version? Will WiFi etc still work or will I need to get something to connect to networks?
  • Presumably that will all need to be done via the CLI if no, which is fine, but not sure how to go about doing that…
  • I like Wayland so would sway be a better option here for safety?

Sorry for lots of questions, but it seems like I’m going down the rabbit hole and don’t want to screw myself over :joy: For most of the things I care about in .config I do have a github repo.

2

Yes kde is still a good option if you are happy with it if not you could always try another DE.

You can get a package list of all the applications on your system with pacman and save the list to a file and then reinstall packages from the file.
sudo pacman -Qqn > packages.text
this will not list packages that were installed from the AUR

3

Everything except the packages shown in the DE section.

You can use the command nmtui to connect to your wifi network.

That being said, there is no reason to reinstall to install KDE. You can do that from your current install.

You can install eos-packagelist and then run

eos-packagelist KDE-Desktop --install

That will install all our KDE packages into your current install.

It shouldn’t change any settings so it shouldn’t break anything.

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