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maybe this is a stupid question, but is it possible to run two sessions of a desktop envoirement at the same time (preferrably Cinnamon) and be able to switch between them like you can switch between terminal sessions with Ctrl + Alt + (F1,F2,F3) ?

I have a screen and a beamer and I want to either run the presentation on the beamer (notes on the mainscreen) OR the screen magnifier on the beamer (and the demonstrated program on the main screen). I can already do that with one session of cinnamon, but it requires a few clicks and that is somewhat unprofessional and I figured that I rather ask a dumb question than breaking my cinnamon by doing something dumb.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: It's much easier than that. Just add the workspaces applet to your taskbar and you can switch between workspaces. I don't know why I hadn't thought about that earlier... I will not delete it in case someone else doesn't think of the workspaces.

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    If you have an answer, than write an answer :)
    – A.B.
    Jun 1, 2015 at 19:27

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While workspaces are the way to go here, I'll still answer the original question. It's not hard to run multiple instances of X - the system that actually is the GUI. You just need to use startx (and optionally .xinitrc). See my other answer for a quick intro to using it, and the Arch Wiki article on .xinitrc for more complete information.

On each TTY you want to run Cinnamon on, you just need to do:

startx /usr/bin/gnome-session --session=cinnamon

Then switch between them the way you normally would switch to the corresponding TTY.

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