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I want to be sure whether it going to break something like my default Unity desktop or not. I once tried KDE on Ubuntu and it broke the whole theme. I had to reinstall Ubuntu that time.

I dont want that to happen again.

I have found this which explains how I can Install XFCE or other DEs Available for Ubuntu 11.10.

Community
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Curious Apprentice
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  • I've just installed lxde by sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop and I lost access to ANY desktop environment. I had to re-enable Unity plugin as per instructions here http://askubuntu.com/questions/17381/unity-doesnt-load-no-launcher-no-dash-appears – Bucic Dec 03 '12 at 22:56

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I have them both installed right now. I just logged out and back in on both DEs. I have KDE, XFCE, Gnome fallback, and Unity installed for testing purposes. Aside from occasional cluttered menus and file associations, it works fine for me.

RobotHumans
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  • Okay ! so it do have Cluttered menus. I also have Gnome Fall back but the menu looks very odd, that why I always use Unity. – Curious Apprentice May 04 '12 at 10:43
  • You can clean up the menu-system or pick one DE and stick with it. Having both KDE and a GTK based -desktop package installed pulls in a bunch of Apps for both gtk and qt. – RobotHumans May 04 '12 at 10:45
  • How to clean up ? Do you mean go to /usr/share/applications and delete app.desktop files ? or purging individual apps parmanently ? – Curious Apprentice May 04 '12 at 10:51
  • By editing app.desktop files you can change if and where they appear in the menu-system. By editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list you can modify file associations. – RobotHumans May 04 '12 at 10:53
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There is no one true answer to this question, since it depends on the environments you want to install on one system. I currently have unity, gnome-shell, gnome-session-fallback and awesome installed and they get along fairly well, which makes sense since the first three are pretty much the same (configuration and application-wise) and awesome does not share any settings with the former or bring in any other applications.

You just have to know that there might be some caveats to running multiple DE's. For example installing gnome-shell will overwrite unity keyboard shortcuts.

You won't run into major (think unusable system) Problems, but installing xfce will pull more than just the DE, like the suite of standard xubuntu applications. This means that your System will be filled with unnessecary redundancy.

That being said, xfce can be installed here:

Click to install

Basscal
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  • Can you post screenshots of your Desktops ? I want to have a clear view how they looks. I have Unity which looks clean, but when I switch to gnome it looks like full with broken launchers, icons etc. – Curious Apprentice May 04 '12 at 10:57