Too Many Desktop Environments?

[uc50_ic4more]

All of the DE's you mentioned hypothetically are GTK-based. There ought not to be too terribly much in the way of "wasted" disk space. Heck, you may be able to maintain one GTK theme throughout all of those DE's. Greybird comes to mind as a GTK theme that may well look and feel alarmingly similar across Unity, "straight" Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, Mate and Cinnamon!

[Bouvet]

I think there's a bit of confusion here because of the title of the thread. You actually mean too many desktop environments rather than desktops. I'll change the title to reflect this.

Oops, I didn't realize there was a difference in wording. Sorry.
Yes, I meant 'environments'. I was told by someone else that
too many 'environments' is bad and harmful. After reading this
thread, I think he was greatly mistaken as I was in my wording.

[Bouvet]

All of the DE's you mentioned hypothetically are GTK-based. There ought not to be too terribly much in the way of "wasted" disk space. Heck, you may be able to maintain one GTK theme throughout all of those DE's. Greybird comes to mind as a GTK theme that may well look and feel alarmingly similar across Unity, "straight" Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, Mate and Cinnamon!

Good to know. I didn't want to put too many 'environments' on
and have it slow my system down. I think I'll stay with the three
that I have and stop while I'm ahead.

[uc50_ic4more]

Good to know. I didn't want to put too many 'environments' on
and have it slow my system down. I think I'll stay with the three
that I have and stop while I'm ahead.

Remember that you'd only be running one DE at a time; so having multiple DE's installed - especially when they're all so closely related in terms of the graphical toolkits used to build and display them, means that at worst you're going to have some redundancy in the applications you have. One DE may use an application to view images and another DE may use another. But given that you can set these defaults independently of the DE with which each application is associated, this actually avails you with more choices!

When I used Arch as my primary OS, my cobbled-together customized DE was a combination of XFCE and LXDE components.

[Bouvet]

Yes UC50, I'm finding out that the more DE I have, the more updating I have to do when I use them . I'll keep the three I'm running, but I have a gut feeling eventually I'll remove one and just have two.
Of course after admitting that, I have no idea how to remove them! LOL. I'll have to poke around this site and I'm sure there's a link or two. Thanks for stopping by to leave your remarks.

[VanillaMozilla]

The desktops are not really well separated. You will litter your menus with elements of more than one desktop, and you probably won't know which programs belong to which. Each desktop will also change some defaults, and you will have no idea how to change them back. So it's a little messy, but it probably won't break anything.

P.S. Cinnamon is not Gnome Classic. To get that, install the gnome-fallback-session package. That one really doesn't seem to clutter your system much.

One problem I had with adding desktops is that the logon manager may break. You can stll log on, but you may not have a choice of sessions. That problem is allegedly fixed, except when it isn't.