Long, long ago I used debian on the desktop. It came on a huge number of CDs, installation/setup was a pain in the ***, but when it was all done it happened that I selected 5 different window managers to choose from on a whim.

In recent years, I've been installing from liveCDs, mostly from Ubuntu-derived distros. Sometimes I'll multi-boot and have different distros, with different window managers, on different partitions. This is so easy to dobut I have yet to successfully install and configure a second window manager, running on the same partition such that I can switch back and forth on the fly. I mean - mostly on the fly. I understanding shutting down many windowmanager specific services might be necessary.

For example, I want to be able to log out of gnome and switch to XFCE without rebooting my machine.

Has anyone done this using an Ubuntu-derived distro? Or any distro aside from debian?

I haven't been doing it lately because Gnome and Metacity fit my needs nicely, but it should still be possible, even on different levels. You could for example start a new session with just the window manager and no desktop environment (or even without any window manager at all and start one later manually). I think all you have to do is install the packages, and then you should be able to choose which window manager to start at the login screen. Or you could do all sorts of manual tweaking as well: in the good old days I would not even start the GUI on boot, and launch it later manually if I'd needed it. Those times are long gone though, and I got lazy.

Yes, i've mucked around with various workarounds, at some points killing and restarting X itself, explicitly launching what i want from the command line, and i think i may even had different window managers configured to launch on different runlevels.

What i want now is a super-easy installation which pre-configures it the way debian had it - which is like this:



For some reason, this didn't work for me last few times i tried it on ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives.





I hear that.

I think what you are looking for is a display manager.
wdm comes to mind. I'm sure there are more.
I don't use em, so I can't make a recommendation.
Hope that gets you on a good track.

sudo apt-cache search <display manager you are looking for>. If you were a previous Linux user, you'll probably what to do next when it come to the dependencies.

Wdm like fobroth above said might help you too. But all of them are available as downloads from the repositories.

Fobroth and GkE, thank you!

I just looked into wdm, and i'm guessing xdm (like wdm) was what debian (and no other distro) had auto-installed and auto-configured for me in the past. when using apt to install other guis, i didn't know i also had to install and setup a wdm.

it might be that these days package managers are smart enough to auto-install and configure wdm/xdm when a person has installed more than one DE, and this would have been a non-issue if i'd simply tried it.

Fobroth and GkE, thank you!

I just looked into wdm, and i'm guessing xdm (like wdm) was what debian (and no other distro) had auto-installed and auto-configured for me in the past. when using apt to install other guis, i didn't know i also had to install and setup a wdm.

it might be that these days package managers are smart enough to auto-install and configure wdm/xdm when a person has installed more than one DE, and this would have been a non-issue if i'd simply tried it.