Got a funny one: About 6-7 weeks ago I finally got fed up with MS in general & Win11 in particular, so I took the plunge and went “full linux”: Rocky with KDE. Since then I’ve been slowly tweaking KDE to be exactly how I want it - everything AOK; very happy with things.
Yesterday KDE Discover wanted to do an update, as it has innumerable times before - all good.
However, this morning I fired up the PC to discover a “strange” desktop had replaced KDE Plasma. I later worked out that this was Gnome. I’ve since spend a good chun of the day downloading fresh iso copies of Rocky KDE and Rocky Gnome (Workstation), installing into a couple of VBox VMs, all in an effort to replicate the issue - which I can’t.
So a couple of Qs:
Has anyone else struck this?
Does anyone have any idea how it happened? Without being able to reproduce the issue I’m using correlation with the update as the cause, but correlation is not causation.
How can I correct it (safely - data’s been backed-up, so a complete re-install is an option but a not-very-desirable one)? I can’t stand Gnome and want my (tweaked) Plasma back
Thanks in advance
Cheers
Dulux-Oz
PS FTR: This is not related in any way to my other post today
I haven’t heard of an automatic update somehow installing and switching to GNOME.
You can likely just uninstall the gnome-desktop3 package and get defaulted back to KDE. Might be wise to dnf groupinstall "KDE Plasma Workspaces" afterwards just to make sure everything’s squared away on the KDE end.
Also, assuming you have /home on it’s own partition, there’s never really a need to completely reinstall. Just use the custom partitioning in the installer to reuse the old partitions, and mark all of them except the home partition for formatting. That’ll keep all your user data in place, though settings / data stored outside of the home directory (for example network configurations) will still be blown away.
It would help to know how you set up KDE in the first place, e.g. did you use the official Rocky 9.3 ISO and then chose something (without Gnome), and then somehow added KDE?
It’s worth checking dnf logs to see if it really was caused by an update.
I used the Official Workstation (KDE) live iso and installed from there.
As I said, I don’t know if it was an update that did it, but just that an update occurred (relatively) just before the issue raised its ugly head.
Still, all fixed now (see my previous reply.
So it appears that the Gnome destop was installed almost a month ago, but it only “showed” up a few days ago - I still have no idea what happened (I certainly didn’t ask for Gnome to be installed), but there it was.
Anyway, all fixed now, so all good (see my previous replies)
The DM (display manager) has config files that describe DEs.
When you login – have chosen/written username and are about to type password –
at least the GDM shows a cog-wheel on bottom right, where one can select the DE
for the session. The list is generated from the config files.
Default is used as long as one does not explicitly select session type. If you do switch,
then the choice seems to be saved somewhere and used from then on (until changed
again).
Installation, removal, and hence updates of packages can change the list of available
DEs. Probably affect the default too. If one did use default, then the observed change
was due to such event.
