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I want to try out some alternative desktops, see whats going on, but I have a annoying issue, when I install a desktop package I get all the applications and stuff that come with it just added to the system.

Lets say I want KDE installed side by side with Unity, my Unity would become cluttered with all the KDE stuff and visa versa.

My solution was to make a new user and have just KDE for this user letting me try KDE without spoiling my Unity, this did not work as planned and both users can see both sets of applications, not just the ones for that desktop.

What I would like to achieve is, users that can see only the programs they installed, so my KDE stuff would be available to the KDE user only and same for Unity and any others, I guess they would act almost like two separate installs.

Can I do this ?

I can't just make a new partition and install KUbuntu as I have no more HDD space.

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  • One solution would be to use OnlyShowIn= in .desktop file you copy from /usr/share/applciations to your local ~/.local/share/applciations. But this is tedious to do
    – solsTiCe
    Jul 18, 2015 at 9:42
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    @solsTiCe Thanks for the suggestion, this would certainty achieve what I need, but it would be a VERY long process to manually edit all these .desktop files manually, a lot of work just to have a look at some DTE's, perhaps there is a command I can run to edit all .desktop files in the folder adding the line OnlyShowIn=Unity to many files at once before installing KDE, then I would only need to edit the KDE ones, but I could install just KDE, adding any applications I need later, making this process much more streamlined.
    – Mark Kirby
    Jul 18, 2015 at 9:53

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The only easy way of doing this in Linux right now is using a virtual machine to try out KDE on. There are hard ways, including editing all .desktop files, compiling KDE from scratch, or installing a separate distro, but for what you want a virtual machine would be the best approach.

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