I have tried it on several distros before and it always causes problems because you get a million more packages intermingled with your already installed packages and sometimes you get conflicts or whatever. But it usually messes up my system. is there a safe way to have several desktops installed? or do you pretty much install a new one then remove the old one? thanks

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    161·
    11 months ago

    I’ve never had trouble with package conflicts. You get duplicates for just about every built-in application (password managers/calculators/calendars/etc.) if you install all the recommends, but they should all work together as long as you don’t enable foreign PPAs and other known conflicting package sources like that.

    I tried KDE a while back and it seems to add a boatload of services and tools, so when I went back to Gnome I removed leftovers for weeks; I really should’ve made Timeshift take a snapshot.

    • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
      7·
      11 months ago

      What a mood. Im very guilty of not making backups and ruining setups only to have to start all over.

      I’m a fairly new linux user so this is bound to happen again lol.

        • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
          3·
          11 months ago

          Yup. Ive heard timeshift is good. Now i just gotta actually use it.

          Hows the experience with timeshift been when youve used it? Pretty easy to restore from?

          • MrTHXcertified@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            5·
            11 months ago

            Pretty easy, and it’s saved my bacon a handful of times. Most recently I restored from command line because I borked my display driver (legacy Nvidia user).

            Aside from that instance, everything else was done through the GUI.

      • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
        5·
        11 months ago

        oh dude i never do backups each time i start over from scratch its a brand new version of linux. the only “important” files (that I know of), i sync to the cloud.

        • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
          3·
          11 months ago

          Haha i feel that man. I’m thinking of switching to Linux entirely and ditching Windows so i gotta get better at making backups otherwise its gonna be full reinstalls no stop.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        4·
        11 months ago

        That’s why I use Timeshift, snapshots only take a second to make and (if you set up the script right) will be made automatically whenever apt is called. It’ll probably be a lot slower on non-BTRFS systems (hard links instead of snapshots) but it’s still a lot faster than basic copying.

        • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          Oh thats neat. I’m assuming that can be configured for other package managers when you’re calling the apt equivalent?

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            2·
            11 months ago

            Any package manager with pre install hooks should work. I know someone has written the necessary hooks for pacman, if Timeshift is in your distro’s package standard package manager I bet there’s a hook pre-written for you as well.

            If there isn’t, Timeshift can also take daily/weekly/monthly/per-boot snapshots (with an optional limit for each separate type to keep). Because snapshots only track the differences, and /home is excluded by default, snapshots are generally smaller than a gigabyte or so because they only track OS updates and such. Older snapshots will grow in size as the difference between them and the current system state grows, but 9 months and an upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 to 22.10 only took up 54GB on a 1TB disk.

            I like the “take a snapshot each boot” option because you can revert every boot rather than specific actions, especially when your package manager lacks the necessary hooks.