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I have dual boot of Xubuntu 13.10 and Linux Mint 16 Petra KDE. I have installed Geany on Xubuntu and Amarok on Mint. Is there a way I can run Geany from Mint and Amarok from Xubuntu? Please help and thanks in advance :)

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  • With dual boot this would be tough, since the programs probably depend on different libraries that may or may not be installed/same version. You can try mounting the drive of the other OS and looking in /usr/bin.
    – Nattgew
    May 6, 2014 at 2:23

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In general sharing application binaries between different distributions is not possible without additionally adapting other aspects of our systems.

Most applications make extensive use of libraries shared with other applications to make the code lean. This means that whenever we run an application we need to make sure we have all libraries needed also installed.

On installation of a program our package management takes care to add missing libraries as a dependency. This will not be the case if we only pointed to an application binary installed in a different distribution. Amarok for example needs many KDE-specific libraries which will be installed in a KDE desktop but not in XFCE. In the latter case you'd need to install all those KDE-libraries there to be able to run Amarok. Then you could also install Amarok on XFCE in the first place. It will take a little more code but it will be considerably more stable then.

In addition, the file hierarchy and application settings format may differ between program versions, releases or distributions. Therefor we may already have issues if we only shared our HOME directory with a different release or distribution.

In summary, it is not a good idea to share application binaries or configurations between different releases or distributions.

What people do if they wanted to run the same application on different desktop environments is they install just the desktop environments but not the whole distibutions (e.g. install Cinnamon desktop in Xubuntu or install Xubuntu desktop in Mint).

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  • So if I install Debian Xfce along with them can I share applications across Xubuntu and Debian?
    – user247696
    May 13, 2014 at 5:48
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Do you want the programs to share data across OSes? If not, then since they're both similar OSes, you can use the same apt-get commands to install the programs.

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  • That's the point I want them to share the same settings. I didn't want to download them twice.
    – user247696
    May 6, 2014 at 3:28

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