Budgie Desktop Enviroment changed to Gnome

Hello!

I have 2 systems in my PC (Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 and Fedora 36 Gnome). Recently my Fedora was updated and it seens that impacted Ubuntu too. When I opened Ubuntu, my Desktop Enviroment was changed to Gnome. It was very strange.

I would like to know how can I run Budgie Desktop Enviroment again.

Hmm

I dont see how two separate installs on different partitions will interfere with each other unless they are somehow joined together sharing a common partition.

Please share how the distros are installed.

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Hi,

a common « separate home partition » + same users names in both systems ?

lsblk -fe7 -o +size       # from a maximized terminal window

might give a clue.

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I have Fedora Gnome 36 and Ubuntu Budgie installed. Both using the same /home partition.

I found a solution. Searching the internet I found that I have to reconfigure lightdm.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Then I have to set lightdm as default application
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
edit the line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash init=/lib/systemd/systemd”

And lastly, update grub
update-grub

I was able to open Budgie Desktop, but I found that some applets stopped working…

You shouldnt share the same user account between two desktop environment logins.

Fedora gnome is very different from ubuntu gnome. Ubuntu budgie needs the underlying ubuntu gnome config stuff. I have no idea what fedora maybe interfering with … so the simplest solution is to create a budgie specific user account to login with.

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…and same name user for both systems ?

If that’s your situation, don’t look further. A personal folder /home/$USER ( = $HOME ) contains 2 families of data :
visible ones which are your medias and documents,
hidden ones which are settings and parameters for any program ever launched by your $USER ( here probably launched from 2 different DE + 2 different OS + programs at different versions… :roll_eyes: )

The visible ones have no specific ties and links to your system, they are just « documents » in a broad meaning for you, the human. They are OS/DE agnostic, sort of speaking.

The hidden ones are specific to the host OS and to any of the programs this human ever launched, desktop environment included.

If you shared only ONE /home/$USER between TWO operating systems, that can only lead to mismatches in configurations ( stored in the hidden elements of your $HOME ) : what Fedora36 writes there is not what Budgie22.04 expects, and vice-versa.
AND
Even if you had only one OS, sharing only ONE /home/$USER between TWO Desktop Environments will sooner or later lead to the same kinds of mismatches : what Budgie DE writes there is not what Gnome-DE expects and vice-versa.

So what to do now ?
1⋅ from any of your system, backup your personal data. Have somewhere a confident copy of the whole /home/$USER ( I assume there’s only one user, but if many, have a whole copy of the /home folder which contains the many $HOME ).
2⋅ from each system, create a new user, each one with a different name → important ! One for Fedora, one for Budgie, in order for each one to have his own $HOME inside your « separate /home partition ».

Once done, we’ll see later how sharing data between those two users ( no need to duplicate data between the two accounts, symbolic links are your friends. )


This is another example of why a « separate /home partition » is not always the best way to organize user’s data. It’s good when you keep on staying the same OS and DE and don’t have many users to manage. Once other OS and DE and users come into play, there might be safer strategy ( only separate visible data, not the whole /home folder tree. )

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I shared the same user in the /home folder on both systems to be able to access my files, but it ended up causing more problems for me… :man_facepalming:

I will backup the user account and create two new users for each system now.

About symbolic links, how do I share files for two different users?