Fun With Corrupted DE's

[Zema Bus]

This weekend I replaced the machine I use alongside the company laptop, replacing it with the Fractal box and MSI board I was trying to use as my main machine, I put the 12th gen i7 previously in it before I got the i9 back in it (the i9 is now in my Corsair box & Gigabyte board). I installed vanilla Debian on it so that I won't have a lot of updates and copied my firefox profile and all my other data back to it so that my workflow will be unchanged. Then I did the same with the machine I have live streams on while working, only I went with the Mate desktop since it's a low spec machine. It wasn't until afterwards that I remembered that Mate's power management turns off the screen while videos are playing. I couldn't find any solution to it. I tested it and indeed it would be a problem. So, I installed Plasma since I knew that would solve the problem. Well that turned out to be a mistake. The end result was a hopelessly corrupted mess. Everything was broken. After dropping out to a tty and unsuccessfully attempted to fix things I just copied my firefox profile to a flash drive and reinstalled. It was getting late so I installed Spiral Linux (same developer who created Gecko Linux), which only uses Debian repos but adds a few config changes and their own wallpaper. Then I copied my firefox profile back, which is all I need on that machine. I think this is the first time I've seen Plasma get screwed up by the presence of another DE, usually it's Plasma that does it to other DE's. I miss the days when it was safe to have multiple DE's installed.

[Grogan]

You could have had shit from Mate in autostart or something. For example, XFCE dumps a bunch of shit in there and it used to be a cat and mouse game of me deleting them, arch putting them back every time there's an XFCE update etc. (I don't even have xscreensaver though, so that does nothing)

[grogan@nicetry autostart]$ pwd
/etc/xdg/autostart
[grogan@nicetry autostart]$ ls
at-spi-dbus-bus.desktop xfce-polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop
geoclue-demo-agent.desktop xfsettingsd.desktop
pulseaudio.desktop xscreensaver.desktop
xfce4-notifyd.desktop

Now, those have the "OnlyShowIn" directive so they should only be processed under XFCE so they shouldn't do any harm but some DE's startup manager might execute them or something.

There also seem to be some of them that have additional autostart conditions. For example, the ati-spi-dbus accessibility desktop daemon.

OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;
NoDisplay=true
AutostartCondition=GSettings org.gnome.desktop.interface toolkit-accessibility

I don't use Gnome or Unity, but but meet the AutostartCondition.

KDE used to be smart about that by the way. If it changed a setting, it was a KDE specific override for it, for example trying to match your GTK+ styling with your KDE/QT styling ("apply settings and colors to non-KDE applications" or whatever it says). It was like .gtkrc-2.0-kde instead of writing to your .gtkrc-2.0 file.

That's partly why I don't use complex desktop environments. XFCE is bad enough nowadays, but my gaming window manager, IceWM, won't ever conflict with anything.

P.S. You also have to watch saved sessions. To the point where you shouldn't even do it. If you save a session on exit from one DE, then start another, then start the other again, the other DE's desktop daemons, that don't ever seem to exit anymore, may launch (XFCE is especially bad for that when you save sessions) and it can be somewhat toxic. That was another good thing about old KDE, it killed all its daemons when the last KDE application quits. (more suitable for running KDE applications outside of KDE... I still use stuff from my Trinity like that without ever starting it)