Apologies if this would be better placed in a different channel.
I’ve been driving Gnome on CachyOS for a while now (AMD system with wayland running the session), and recently got an upgraded monitor that requires scaling. In Gnome however, it also has the disadvantage that it scales all games as well (e.g., instead of reporting 4k resolution, it’s x in 1.25x = 3840 by y in 1.25y=2160).
This leads to me to perhaps try KDE or another DE with better support for scaling. Can anyone recommend the simplest / easiest way to try this out? Is it as simple as pacman -Syu plasma-desktop or is there a more preferred solution? Ideally with all the tweaks / themes / settings that a fresh install with CachyOS would include.
Hi aliaska,
I recently switched from Gnome to KDE and can recommend that you seriously check out CachyOS KDE Plasma edition. I work with and test a lot of distributions and right now, the momentum lies with CachyOS. For those who have new(er) hardware, CachyOS is “THE” distribution to beat in 2024.
Oh yes I’m already on CachyOS, and very happy to be here. I just initially installed it with Gnome as the DE, and want to try KDE with all the CachyOS themes and tweaks – is that possible by just pacman -Syu plasma-desktop or is there a better way to do that? I’d like to avoid reinstalling everything in a fresh install if possible.
Well, for starters, you can live-boot off of your flash drive you used to install and play with the scaling.
As far as mixing KDE & Gnome, I would not. There is very little that Gnome can do that KDE can not. I understand though that if you made a ton of customizatins, that you are hesitant but it is up to you how you solve your Gideon knot. I chose to cut it.
Ah, in that case, what would be the easiest way to do a fresh install with KDE and not lose all my current files and configuration?
I don’t do much customization, just installed a few flatpaks and customized those for gaming, but otherwise everything is pretty standard. Using zfs, for what it is worth.
Awesome thank you! I’ll take a look at cosmic, as it seems like I could just test drive it on the side (and was unaware they had gone to a statically compiled binary – I hadn’t realized they’d completely rewritten to be independent of gnome code).
I think I may give Cosmic a try, and if I like it perhaps later I will do a fresh install with that as the daily driver (once it’s out of alpha / beta).
+1 to @prt1337
You can keep both, by just creating a new USER for plasma session, to keep things nice and tidy.
BUT if you don’t like it, it is long removal process so there is that to consider.
So if i would want to switch a DE and remove the old one could I just install the group for one DE and uninstall the group for the other?
I’m planning to do that on Ubuntu for a site wide amnesic netboot installation with hundreds of client machines, but that is another story. (And especially another Distro. (-: )
