Hugh, the question from Evan was about experiences.  

Evan's original question was about having both KDE and Cinnamon on Linux Mint.  I haven't replicated that situation directly, but am close with Unity and KDE on Ubuntu.

While the majority of voices on the web seem to be believe that Ubuntu + KDE Desktop (installed via Synaptic) --> Kubuntu, my experience is that that isn't 100% valid.  I'm finding that Kubuntu (and its associated bundled products) are sufficiently different from Ubuntu that the practical way for coherence is to keep them separate.   As an example, KDE Connect finds my Android phone practically out of the box on Kubuntu.  In theory, installing KDE Connect installs on Ubuntu from Synaptic, but then I couldn't configure it to connect, and discovered the many bug reports of people not getting that to work.

I don't have enough experiences with Fedora to comment on that.  And, I suspect the fans of Arch are snickering about whether the desktop environment can (or should) be fully decoupled from the underlying infrastructure.  The fact the KDE team seems to do development first on KDE Neon continuously, and then Kubuntu into 6 month releases, speaks to how complicated packaging the distros can be.

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 4:01 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: David Ing isss--- via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| The better way to handle mutliple desktop environments is to have separate
| root partitions for each Linux distribution that you're going to install.

Golly, that sounds like overkill.  Or buggy distros.  Or buggy Desktop
Environments.

I'm using Fedora 26 on this notebook.  After I read this message, I
installed KDE (alongside the standard Gnome desktop).  Fedora has a lot of
Desktop Environmants that you can choose to nstall.

        sudo dnf group install 'KDE (K Desktop Environment)'

I then logged out, told GDM to make my session KDE (or maybe Plasma, I
don't remember).  It doesn't seem to be a problem.

What symptoms should I be looking for in Desktop Environment clashes?

I generally gave up fussing with desktops in the late 1980's.  I got
tired of "investing" and then having my choices washed away by the
Next Thing.  So I'm not too discenring and may have missed some
problems.

Fedora supposedly supports a bunch of Desktop Environments and I have
no reason to doubt this.

My son has some complaints about a light-weight Desktop Environment
(LXDE?) and sound on an old Fedora.  So not every DE works equally well.
---
Talk Mailing List
talk@gtalug.org
https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk