Right now I'm using the KDE desktop on Fedora, but I want to switch to Gnome. Problem is, I have many things open right now (xterms, xemacs, etc, etc), and I don't want to close all of them, log out, switch, then reopen everything…that'd take way too long.
So my question is: is it possible to switch to Gnome without having to log out?? Or switch but NOT have to close and reopen everything?
Best Answer
I'd say ultimately no. Many things can be swapped out or used together like having both Gnome Terminal and Konsole open. You can also have Dolphin/Konqueror open with Nautilus. You can probably kill the Gnome Panel and start KDE's version of it, but switching the whole desktop is complicated by the session manager. The session manager is the one process started by the login manager that represents the session. If it exits, the session ends regardless of anything else running. When X11 sees the session end it will kill any existing connections to programs and restart the X server. Also, the session manager will restart any processes like Gnome Panel that it believes is vital to the session. You can change this for each process under preferences, but these settings will be saved making it difficult to try to restore your desktop to normal.