I have tried it on several distros before and it always causes problems because you get a million more packages intermingled with your already installed packages and sometimes you get conflicts or whatever. But it usually messes up my system. is there a safe way to have several desktops installed? or do you pretty much install a new one then remove the old one? thanks
Containerization!
Use either Nix (the package manager) or Distrobox.
With Distrobox, you can create a few containers, install the favoured DE in each one separated, and use the “distrobox-export -a your-DE” function.
But I don’t know how seamless it will work, you might have to read into it.
Seconded, Distrobox is the way to go.
Here’s how you can actually make it work seamlessly @Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml :
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md