Known incompatibilities/conflicts when installing multiple specific desktop environments

I'm interested in installing multiple desktop environments, however I am also worried about possible conflicts between different desktop environments. I can't seem to find any information about what specific conflicts that exist between specific desktop environments.

The desktop environments that I'm interested in are KDE Plasma, Budgie, Xfce, LXQt, Trinity, and Gnome which is already installed.

For fairly obvious reasons, I don't expect to be able to install all of these at once, but I do want to know which specific ones have incompatibilities.

I'm using Ubuntu 19.10.


My own Ubuntu started with Ubuntu 17.10 (pre-release) where I added LXDE (Lubuntu), XFCE (Xubuntu), MATE (Ubuntu-MATE). It's now been release-upgraded a few times and am now on 20.04 with the LXDE being replaced by LXQt.

As I don't have, nor have ever added Budgie/Trinity to anything - I can't speak to those.

In my experience when you add the second desktop you'll be unlikely to have problems, the chance of problems increases as you add more.

I had problems with KDE & MATE on my box (LXDE & XFCE & GNOME already there), but if [all] my other desktops weren't installed KDE & MATE went perfectly together.

I also found the order they are installed matters; I played with what I wanted (decided to drop KDE & just use MATE; if re-doing today I'd go the other way & keep KDE)

On the KDE/MATE clash, I couldn't find the clash (to raise bug report) as I loaded KDE/MATE combinations easily in testing with any other base desktop; the issue only occurred with my wanted desktops... ie. the more you have the more problems you should expect.

I use many boxes, and nearly all have multiple desktops; I'd expect very minor problems only when adding >2, and more as the number increases.


GNOME shell, KDE Plasma, MATE, XFCE should cooperate without conflicts.

I don't know about Trinity and i have never tested LXQt + KDE Plasma. GNOME Shell and Budgie use the same configs so conflicts often happens.

If you install KDE Plasma you can have visual problems with QT and GTK themes.

BTW i think 19.10 is the most stable release for installing multiple DE.