What's the difference to just installing a different desktop environment?
The author tries to explain this by portraying installing a new desktop environment as impractical:
> First, I tried KDE Plasma but was quickly reminded why I didn't much care for that desktop environment (it's too much like Windows). Then I tried Enlightenment, but that environment didn't much care for Wayland, so it was a no-go. I was going to install standard GNOME, but that would break Pop!_OS. Pantheon? Nope.
But it seems unconvincing. Universal Blue is neither going to fix the author's distaste for KDE, nor that Enlightenment doesn't support Wayland. And the fact that GNOME and Pantheon cannot be installed on Pop!_OS doesn't mean we need yet another whole new distro - just choose an existing distro that _can_ install new desktop environments! I know Arch can, and probably its derivatives and many other popular distros too.
Guessing from the article, but I think rather than attempting to install everything on top of everything else, and then deriving the uninstallation or replacement of packages from conflicts arising out of that process piecemeal, as per the usual package management strategy, with all the unpredictable complexity entailed, there is instead a planned tree structure for the dependencies, so that the switch is analogous to git rebase to a different branch of a repository and not to series of increasingly desperate manual invocations of /usr/bin/patch
There is no reason they cannot be installed beside each other.
GDM, etc have made this easy for years. On installation 'simpler' distros let you choose as many desktop environments as you wanted from the install.
(Gnome/KDE/XFCE/Flux/...)
And you still had /home/[user] common between desktop environments by default.
If someone has been using Linux since 1996 and is surprised by this "rebase"...
Benefit of doubt, maybe a poorly chosen analogy?
Edit: also, with no malice. that justification sounds like rebuilding the wheel. Package management system == Wheel ...
Now distribution are often centered on a DE, but before it was very common to have all the possible choices a available with any distribution.
At that time, it was one of the fun thing to install multiple distributions (gnome, KDE, xfce, wm, blackbox, hundreds of small ones...) And switch between them just by logging out and selecting a new one for logging.
Linux being magic with everything shared in the home folder, it was just the desktop changing but all the files staying the same.
> sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:38
> After the process was completed, I rebooted, logged in, and saw a completely different desktop environment.
Interesting idea. Hopefully it will have diff, and maybe checkout --force as well!
I wonder what the possibilities are for other choices than desktop environment - audio stack, maybe? - and how hard for the maintainers a multiplicity of these would be?
Any desktop that groups multiple instances of the same program as one icon without distinguishable titles and not using the full width of a monitor needs a rethink.
Why do I need to hover or two clicks or multiple alt+tabs or even switch the virtual desktop just to switch from one window of chrome to another window of chrome. Why are we going backwards in terms of basic UX just to make things look pretty.
It's interesting to compare this to the flexibility provided by functional package manager based OS's; in Nix too can rebase your system, perhaps even more literally.
The author tries to explain this by portraying installing a new desktop environment as impractical:
> First, I tried KDE Plasma but was quickly reminded why I didn't much care for that desktop environment (it's too much like Windows). Then I tried Enlightenment, but that environment didn't much care for Wayland, so it was a no-go. I was going to install standard GNOME, but that would break Pop!_OS. Pantheon? Nope.
But it seems unconvincing. Universal Blue is neither going to fix the author's distaste for KDE, nor that Enlightenment doesn't support Wayland. And the fact that GNOME and Pantheon cannot be installed on Pop!_OS doesn't mean we need yet another whole new distro - just choose an existing distro that _can_ install new desktop environments! I know Arch can, and probably its derivatives and many other popular distros too.