[SOLVED] OK to enable both Gnome & Xfce during installation?

[hughparker1]

DELL Inspiron 5559 laptop with 8 GB RAM
Processor: IntelCore i7-6500U CPU 1 Core, 2 Logical Processors
Integrated Graphics Processor: Intel HD Graphics 520
Discrete Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon R5 M335

downloaded image 'debian-testing-amd64-DVD-1.iso' 2017-02-06 07:30 3.6G

I am going to install Debian Stretch on my son's laptop (see spec above) and he likes Xfce desktop but he would also like to have Gnome desktop for some bitcoin program he uses. So I have a coupe of questions...

Q1. Would be OK to enable both Xfce and Gnome during the install process?

Q2. Is there any disadvantage in having both and then switching between them on a regular basis?

Q3. If there is duplicate application shortcuts in the menu, would it be a good idea to remove any that are not necessary in each of the desktops to keep menus looking tidy?

Q4. Would there be any problems with updates for this setup going forward?

I'm still learning Linux so any advice/guidance on doing above would be appreciated

[HuangLao]

1) yes
2) no
3) will be some duplicates, you can delete to tidy up, but then why install both if you want a tidy menu
4) updates will be fine

[stevepusser]

There should not be any issues, but you can run most GNOME programs in xfce, unless it depends on some special feature like a GNOME extension or panel.

[hughparker1]

1) yes
2) no
3) will be some duplicates, you can delete to tidy up, but then why install both if you want a tidy menu
4) updates will be fine

There should not be any issues, but you can run most GNOME programs in xfce, unless it depends on some special feature like a GNOME extension or panel.

I will check why he thinks he needs Gnome in case Xfce will be able to run it as well. But it looks like I can enable both desktops without causing any issues.

Thanks very much for your quick feedback it is much appreciated.

[makh]

... I'm still learning Linux ...

Testing may break at times. Only advance users can handle that. It would be better to use stable.

[hughparker1]

... I'm still learning Linux ...

Testing may break at times. Only advance users can handle that. It would be better to use stable.

Thanks for feedback. I agree that testing can cause problems if you are not careful.

The main reason I decided to install testing is the laptop is quite new and has Intel Skylake processor so I thought it would benefit from using the newer kernel. I have the same laptop and I installed testing on it last summer and to be honest, it hasn't given me any trouble so far. I was thinking that maybe the system is more stable now since it's been testing since April 2015 and near to the next release.

[stevepusser]

Skylake also requires some non-free firmware for best performance, specifically in this package: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/fir ... sc-nonfree

I think there's also some program that will let you use the switchable graphics, but I'm not sure how that goes with AMD discrete GPUs.

[hughparker1]

Skylake also requires some non-free firmware for best performance, specifically in this package: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/fir ... sc-nonfree
I think there's also some program that will let you use the switchable graphics, but I'm not sure how that goes with AMD discrete GPUs.

Thanks for the feedback. I clicked your link and see that web page mentions package 'firmware-misc-nonfree'

I did have quite a few messages displayed at boot after the initial install so I did a bit of searching and found that installing these packages reduced the messages to only a couple...

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt install firmware-iwlwifi		# this installed driver for my Intel Corp Wireless 3160

$ sudo apt install firmware-linux-nonfree	

$ sudo apt install firmware-realtek

I had a look at the output during the install of package 'firmware-linux-nonfree' and noticed that it did contain the package suggested in your link...

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hugh@DELL-INSP-DEBIAN:~$ sudo apt install firmware-linux-nonfree
[sudo] password for hugh: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  amd64-microcode firmware-amd-graphics firmware-misc-nonfree intel-microcode
  iucode-tool
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  amd64-microcode firmware-amd-graphics firmware-linux-nonfree
  firmware-misc-nonfree intel-microcode iucode-tool
0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,586 kB of archives.
After this operation, 24.1 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

... and looking at Synaptic Package Manager, I can see 'firmware-linux-nonfree' is already installed.

so these are the two remaining messages still displayed during boot after installing the above packages...

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[   9.092392] tpm_crb MSFT0101:00: can't request region for resource [mem Oxfed
[  21.826773] r8169 0000:03:00.0: firmware: failed to load rtl_nic/rt18106e-1.fw (-2)

They don't seem to have any effect when system is booted as it is running very smoothly and very fast. Maybe they are low level information messages?