Switch Gnome with Plasma

As a process of learning i am interested on how can i swap Gnome with Plasma on fresh installed system?
What is easiest process of wiping gnome and it’s configuration and switching with Plasma ones.
What about network manager, how to preserve that?

First check out: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/general-system-settings/removing-a-desktop-environment/2021/03/

Second check out: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/general-system-settings/how-to-install-desktop-environments-next-to-your-existing-ones/2021/03/

Hopefully those two links will help to shed a bit of light into the matter :slight_smile:

Personally, if I was going to switch DE’s I would just do a fresh install of the DE that I wanted to move to to be on the safe side and to prevent any possibilities of conflicts and errors.

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If it’s a fresh install - i wouldn’t even bother. Just reinstall again with KDE. It’s a lot easier and the results are better in the end.

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I like to play with fire, so I load up half a dozen different DEs including the experimental ones like Deepin and Cutefish, then swap between them, then come back to the ones that still work, and try to clean up the mess. :wink:
My psychologocial issues aside; I do know that you can safely mix Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, all so long as you are running from SDDM as the login manager.

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That is right, so there is the package that set up plasma:

plasma-meta

sudo pacman -S plasma-meta

at the breeze login screen you can switch the dm you want to load,
presumed you have sddm already working.

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Installing Plasma is easy, but removing GNOME is difficult. You’ll always have some gnomish residue.

While I’m not a type of person who would recommend reinstalling instead of fixing a problem, in this particular case, a clean install might be a quicker, less painful option.

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I would consider reinstalling. Back up your data and start over. This will give you a chance to create your /home on its own partition, separate from / and finally be able to reinstall without losing your /home. I don’t know why it’s become so popular to put everything in one big partition. That practice came from the Windows world, which is where it should have stayed. :slight_smile:

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I’d rather do a fresh install myself. Gnome intermixed with Plasma is a recipe for disaster i think. :man_shrugging:

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I like to play with fire

he said… :slight_smile: also why not, that way you learn a lot

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I’m a little late on this but I followed the steps described by @dalto in this post and it worked quite well. I booted to tty, made the switch and booted again to SDDM. NetworkManager needed a restart if I do remember correctly. I swapped most GTK apps like gthumb or lollypop for a KDE counterpart. In addition I created a new user and compared the ~/.config and ~/.local/share with my main account. I made this switch about two months ago and encountered no problem so far (at least I’m not aware of one :sunglasses: ).

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