[eropple]

> Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?

I'm a Linux desktop user and I drop into a game once in a while while I'm waiting for another meeting or waiting for a build to finish or whatever. My work desktop doesn't use VRR (the just-for-games PC uses Windows), otherwise I'd be in the same boat as 'jorvi because it quite matters to me that games on my desktop integrate into everything else at a passable level. For me, GNOME does a better job of integrating my different activities than KDE (which wasn't always the case! I was a KDE3 user for a long time!), so I use GNOME. And it remains an unsolved pain in the ass that the Linux desktop experience isn't coherent enough to mean that we should only be thinking about desktop environments if we want to.

Coherent, holistic switching between tasks is a thing that people are allowed to want and attempting to convince people that they don't is a bad look.

> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.

[bee_rider]

>> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

> This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.

It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system, I mean that’s going between X and Wayland, no issues… maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though? Odd.

Anyway, at least there’s a workaround. If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

[eropple]

> maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though

It's a layer down from the DE itself, it's the window manager beneath it. GNOME ships Mutter and KDE ships KWin. GNOME is pretty tightly tied to Mutter; KDE is less tied to KWin, but KWin also tends to support shinier features than Mutter does anyway so I don't know why you wouldn't use it anyway.

> It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this?

Strictly no, but having to have another login session, period, is bonkers to me. It's reasonable to respond to that suggestion with incredulity.

> If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

For me, it's not. At the moment it's inertia, because Windows has legit become the best Linux dev environment I know of with WSL2. I originally switched back to a Linux desktop because I was working on some hardware stuff that benefited from being on a Linux platform, but I'm certainly not tied to it past that.

[OJFord]

> It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system

Ok, sure, it was just the first solution that came to mind. On mine logging in launches straight into sway. I think only in the first session (to allow recovery in case of some related issue) so I suppose I could switch tty and then manually launch whatever DE.

But to me I think the odd observation is that it doesn't need to be a different user if we're talking about still having to log in again anyway.

Unless you mean some kind of session saving, swaymsg exit, and then launch the other one? But then you have to maintain whatever session saving (probably different in each) solution and what have you really gained.