Wish me luck. I’m a little unsure if it’ll work well. I have an ancient GPU (Nvidia GTX 970) and hope it’ll be compatable.
Processor AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core (12 CPUs) Processor 3.20 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4 GB) (actually 3.5GB due to hardware defect)
BaseBoard Manufacturer ASRock
BaseBoard Product AB350 Pro4
This system is getting old; nearly a decade here. Pretty soon I have to start thinking about upgrading. At a minimum, I should try and upgrade the video card when I can.
I’ve been on Bazzite for over a year and it stopped my distro experimentation. It really does ‘just work’ in majority of cases because the developers have a very clear attitude of neto manually install things like graphics drivers or codecs to have image thumbnails to be absurd.
There’s some very cool bootc projects in the works too, like Zirconium (using Niri ans Noctalia) and a new Cosmic one someone just made. You can rebase between these at any time to try out a tiling window manager or different desktop environment, as long as it isn’t Gnome to KDE since those two store things in similar places.
The gnome-kde thing is a bit irritating. I do wonder if there could be a way to set a flag that updates symlinks to those user directories depending on which environment you’re actively using…
There’s probably a way to do it and some people have anecdotally recommended Mending Wall with success. It’s not a problem with Cosmic or window managers since they don’t fight over the same files and directories. The Bazzite/ublue developers just don’t recommend and won’t support anyone rebasing between environments since it’s a DE problem and not theirs. I’ve personally swapped from Bazzite to Zirconium and Origami and back to Bazzite and been fine.
Seems like Mending Wall is just keeping all configs in another directory and hot swapping them as needed by literally deleting and copying them from the target directories.
I figured it would be fine swapping, but still a pain to have config break during a changeover. Would be interesting to try and setup a symlink layer for all DE configuration that you could change at will. That way no files actually need to be modified during a swap