Any danger in trying other desktops such as Lbuntu, XFCE, Xbuntu

[urdrwho5]

I'm thinking of experimenting on this old laptop with 2 gig of memory. I would like to investigate speed and efficiency of other desktops on top of my Kubuntu 12.04 LTS.

I would like to use terminal commands to add as minimal packages as possible and then if they don't work out to use terminal commands to purge all of the stuff.

I don't think so but is there a danger of crashing the entire 12.04 when trying out desktop.

Does trying them take up a lot of HD space?

[GreyGeek]

Not at all. One way is to install VirtualBox and try each one as a guest OS. Although a guest OS doesn't imitate an HD install it will give you the opportunity to try a distro out to see if it might be enough to your liking to try as a dual boot. If you do find one you like then you can use a partition manager to shrink an existing partition to free up about 30-50GB and then install the distro on that partition in dual boot mode.
Everybody here tries out other distros and reports on them frequently. I tried Mint 17.3 KDE for three months (Jan-Mar) as my only installed distro, replacing Kubuntu 14.04. In the end, although Mint is a find distro, I decided that Mint wasn't for me, primarily because Kubuntu has a better Btrfs paradigm, and installed Kubuntu 16.04.

Don't forget to post reports on your experience!

[urdrwho5]

Sorry but I don't think I posed a clear question.

I don't want to replace the OS, I only want to replace the desktop. Currently I can log out of KDE, log back in with a LXDE looking desktop. I'm thinking that perhaps the other desktops will have less GPU activity on my old HP ZV 5000 Nvidia card.

So if I install the other desktops to try I don't want things to get muddled, plus I want to be able to purge them if I don't like them.

Maybe installing just the desktop part won't show any saved resources? Every once in a while I get the bug to try things and then I start thinking that I can never be satisfied. Installing 12.04 Kubuntu LTS brought life back to this old laptop and I think I should just be happy. Then I get the bug and start playing. Luckily it isn't my main box, it is my play box.

Not at all. One way is to install VirtualBox and try each one as a guest OS. Although a guest OS doesn't imitate an HD install it will give you the opportunity to try a distro out to see if it might be enough to your liking to try as a dual boot. If you do find one you like then you can use a partition manager to shrink an existing partition to free up about 30-50GB and then install the distro on that partition in dual boot mode.
Everybody here tries out other distros and reports on them frequently. I tried Mint 17.3 KDE for three months (Jan-Mar) as my only installed distro, replacing Kubuntu 14.04. In the end, although Mint is a find distro, I decided that Mint wasn't for me, primarily because Kubuntu has a better Btrfs paradigm, and installed Kubuntu 16.04.

Don't forget to post reports on your experience!

[GreyGeek]

Ah, that's another question. In the past there have been few problems that I am aware of when installing other Desktop environments. Today I encountered a compatibility problem between the way Ubuntu DE handles telepathy and the Kubuntu Xerus does, and posted a report here.

Plasma5 is new on Xerus and I have no experience installing other DE's on it. There is mate, Cinnamon, edbuntu, ros, lubuntu, xfce4, slim, razor-qt, and I probably missed some, all available for install on Xerus.
They may run different xservers, window managers, etc.

Since I use Btrfs I can create "/" and "/home" snapshots before and after I install a DE and then if things don't work out I can do a sudo snapper -croot undochange n..m and the same thing for "-chome" and revert to the "n" state, then delete both n and m snapshots, logout and log back in.

[oshunluvr]

Agreeing with GG here. If it were me, I would partition the drive and do a bare metal install of the other distro with a different DE. Then you can just wipe and install another. It would give you a chance to see other distros in there entirety while preserving your current install. Once you find one you like, leave it and wipe Kubuntu if desired.

[urdrwho5]

Hm a small partition could give me a view into thefull use of the DE's and OS. This old laptop has a 60 gig HD and is dual boot. XP is on the other partition and I am not sure I have much more to give for another partition. I gave Kubuntu a small cache partition.

Maybe I am better just being happy with what I have?

[oshunluvr]

Well, I would say if you're seeing a lot of lagging and obvious issue with the desktop you would benefit from something lighter weight like XFCE. If you're only seeing some slow downs or minor glitches you might be able to tune your KDE desktop for better performance and reduce system drag by eliminating unnecessary desktop effects.

[urdrwho5]

I tried the LXDE and XFCE4 desktops and could not really see a difference.

I get minimal lag with KDE and like the eye candy better. I might try lubuntu DE but it will probably be the same thing.

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Well, I would say if you're seeing a lot of lagging and obvious issue with the desktop you would benefit from something lighter weight like XFCE. If you're only seeing some slow downs or minor glitches you might be able to tune your KDE desktop for better performance and reduce system drag by eliminating unnecessary desktop effects.

[claydoh]

In some cases you can try out a different desktop without installing all the extras that the Flavour brings in - install lxde or xfce instead of lubuntu-desktop or xubuntu-desktop, for example. More vanilla but a bit lighter perhaps.

There will be menu bloat of course, but you won't get the changes in login managers, splash screens, and possibly other things, such as different services that a full on -desktop would install.

[urdrwho5]

The last one I tried was the lubuntu DE. It was the one that installed a lot of stuff / software. After removing the Lubuntu DE all software wasn't removed. I've spent time removing the software. There are dependencies that I can't seem to get to go away. I went from 58% HD used to 63% and can't get it back down to 58. Those loose dependencies are probably the reason. I'll keep working on it.

I found that to me KDE works the best and no speed was gained from any of the other desktop environments.

In some cases you can try out a different desktop without installing all the extras that the Flavour brings in - install lxde or xfce instead of lubuntu-desktop or xubuntu-desktop, for example. More vanilla but a bit lighter perhaps.

There will be menu bloat of course, but you won't get the changes in login managers, splash screens, and possibly other things, such as different services that a full on -desktop would install.

[GreyGeek]

Well, I would say if you're seeing a lot of lagging and obvious issue with the desktop ....

My son did a fresh install of 16.04 over his 14.04 system. He exported his 7,985 thunderbird emails and tried to import them into KMail using its import feature. Very straight forward. The only problem was that it put EACH email into its own folder under CUR I tried various tricks but none of them worked. So, I showed him a workaround. The 7,985 emails were exported to one folder. I showed him how to use kate (yes, kate) to read all 7,985 emails in kate's documents folder and then to search them for a word or phrase. I showed him a search for "Library materials" and kate showed him 51 emails with that phrase in them. Clicking on one of the emails in the selected list below the text panel cause that email to be displayed in the text panel, highlighting the searched phrase. From there using kate and its context menu he can do just about anything he wants to do.

Now, about the lag. I had imported 4,180 emails when I decided to stop the process. While it was doing that I closed Dolphin. Suddenly things got really slow, more than just laggy. Even after KMail finished deleting the imported emails and I closed it, and nothing was open on the desktop, Kubuntu was slow when I opened KSysGuard. With the %CPU sorting active I noticed that kdeinit5 and dolphin were taking 26% each of the CPU time! I also noticed that kdeinit5 was "waiting on a process" and dolphin was "disk sleeping". Dolphin? I closed it. It shouldn't be open. That process should have said "zombie" and gone away. I right moused on dolphin and selected "terminate". Dolphin immediately disappeared from the process list and the desktop speed snapped back to what a high powered System76 Gazelle should be.

Moral: When your desktop feels laggy open KSysGuard and click on the Processes tab. Click the %CPU header until the most used process is setting at the top of the %CPU column. How much of the CPU time is it taking? Is it showing that it's disk drive connection is "sleeping", or is it "waiting on another process"? Hovering the mouse over a process will display a popup telling you what its parent is, how many children it spawned, etc. Follow those leads to the process that is the cause of the bottle neck. Right mouse on it and choose one of the options made available: send a signal, terminate, kill, etc....