I found this site a while back - basically it will ask you a bunch of questions on your usage of your PC, and will came out with a list of recommended distros, and a list of reasons why YOU could like or not like it.
There are some similar sites to this one, but since I’m not familiar with them, I won’t post them. They are simply DuckDuckGo-able though.
Just install the DE you want on the distro you want… You aren’t limited in your DE by your selected distro, and you can have multiple installed. most of the time you have a drop down when you login that lets you pick your DE.
@Coolcoder360 Installing a DE after installing a distro has often caused me a lot of bugs 🥴. Maybe it is just me
It’s not just you. The DEs themselves generally don’t mess with each other much, beyond possibly messing with each other’s settings. But I’ve seen the the package post installation scripts cause issues. So it depends on the distro I guess.
@patatahooligan @aswinbenny I once installed kde alongside GNOME and it messed with all the settings. It changed the icons and even the fonts. I couldn’t even restore the settings once I decided to stick to GNOME, but thankfully I had a snapshot ready to rollback.
Out of curiosity, what distro was this on?
I’m not the original person, but I’ve had exactly this happen before on both Arch and NixOS. Long ago when I was on Ubuntu I believe this also happened when I tried installing KDE (rather than wiping and installing Kubuntu). I’ve recently seen recommendations from people saying that if you’re going to try to have both GNOME and KDE installed alongside each other, to keep one user only on one, and the other user only on the other so that their config settings don’t get intertwined.
However right now I’m on Fedora Silverblue, I was on Kinoite and did a rebase to Silverblue (which means I went from KDE -> GNOME) and the only issue I had was a few icons were broken, which was resolved through setting it back to Adwaita in Tweak Tool. I’m guessing the fact that the rebase caused all of the KDE packages to get removed while installing the GNOME packages made it conflict less “violently” so to speak - which also had the nice effect of not having a bunch of duplicated apps as well.