I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specific desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if you decide to install a different desktop environment?

I have a laptop that initially came with debian and gnome installed on it
when I got it ~11 yrs ago. As it is older, it has gone through several
debian upgrades. When I upgraded to Trixie, gnome seemed to be more resource intensive than practical for it. Switching to IceWM made
everything "behave better" (i.e. more responsive) in my eyes.
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Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: MIKE POWELL to NIGHTFOX on Sun Feb 01 2026 09:00 am

I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specific
desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if
you decide to install a different desktop environment?

I have a laptop that initially came with debian and gnome installed on it when I got it ~11 yrs ago. As it is older, it has gone through several debian upgrades. When I upgraded to Trixie, gnome seemed to be more resource intensive than practical for it. Switching to IceWM made everything "behave better" (i.e. more responsive) in my eyes.

When I said "behave better", I was referring to what The Wanderer and I had been discussing as far as desktop environment packages being officially supported by the distribution and not causing a problem if installed when upgrading, etc..

Nightfox

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I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specifi
desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if
you decide to install a different desktop environment?

When I said "behave better", I was referring to what The Wanderer and I had been discussing as far as desktop environment packages being officially supported by the distribution and not causing a problem if installed when upgrading, etc..

So by "install" you mean outside of the distro's package system. I would suspect that the answer to your initial question then should either be
"no" or "not unless those who maintain the distro are missing out on something."

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Distros that are more terminal-centric are good candidates, like Arch, Gentoo Slackware, et al. While they come with a GUI, you're not obligated to run it by default.

I have a couple of boxes that run debian variants without a GUI. No obligations there, either. Most distros should be that way but not all
are. :(

Mike
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I remember it used to be that in Linux, you could set the 'runlevel' to determine whether it automatically started in the desktop environment or not think runlevel 3 was to start up at the console, and runlevel 5 was to start in the desktop environment; specifically, to launch XFree86 on startup). And remember being able to exit out of XFree86, and also running 'startx' to run XFree86 again. Is that not the case anymore?

If you are still using a distro that uses a flavor of init, like Devuan,
you can probably still do these things. If you are using a distro that
has migrated to systemd, I am not certain if that would work anymore or
not.

With most distros, you can use a CTRL-ALT-F# at the GUI logon manager main menu to get a console instead.

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Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: MIKE POWELL to NIGHTFOX on Mon Feb 02 2026 08:57 am

I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specifi
desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if
you decide to install a different desktop environment?

When I said "behave better", I was referring to what The Wanderer and I had
been discussing as far as desktop environment packages being officially
supported by the distribution and not causing a problem if installed when
upgrading, etc..

So by "install" you mean outside of the distro's package system. I would suspect that the answer to your initial question then should either be "no" or "not unless those who maintain the distro are missing out on something."

No, not outside the package system. It's available in the package system but not officially supported by the distribution's maintainers.

Nightfox

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