I need some help here from the experts.

Some background below, but here’s the question:

Can I run KDE and Gnome on bazzite? How can I install and manage multiple images? I feel silly asking this, but I’m just not finding the correct documentation.

Background:

I have been running KDE desktop Bazzite on my PC for a while now, and I’m loving the robust and easy system (not to mention the ease of gaming). But I have found that one program just doesn’t work correctly, and I had a game (Stellaris) freeze my system several times.

I ended up installing EndeavorOS on an older PC to experiment, and found out that the program in question (openAndroidInstaller) requires a Gnome portal to access my hardware. (Long live the Terminal!) Now I suspect that perhaps the game freeze wouldn’t happen with Gnome either. So I want to have both on bazzite, but can’t figure it out.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•4 months ago

    You should be able to layer the xdg-desktop-portal-gnome package, which will also pull any dependencies.

    To answer your general question though, yes I believe you can easily install at least minimal versions of each DE with little impact to rpm-ostree performance. They don’t need to be separate images, though that’s possible too by rebasing and pinning. I would just layer the necessary packages to load a GNOME environment (start with rpm-ostree install gnome-shell). This way everything stays up to date with the active image. For example, I’m running GDM under Kinoite simply because I was having unresolvable issues with SDDM and LightDM.

    Pinning separate images would require you to rebase with each image update and then unpin/pin the old/new images…too much work.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•4 months ago

      Thanks! This sounds like the best way to do things.

      I really appreciate the help. I’m going to spend some time learning about this, and your suggestion is where I’ll start.