Multiple DEs installations and ownership of /etc/skel/.xinitrc

[th3f001]

Ok. This is a thing that I keep stumbling upon every now and then.
Last time, this morning while using PAMAC to upgrade the 300+ packages it was alerting as “due for upgrade”.

The output:

Preparing…
Synchronizing package databases…
Resolving dependencies…
Checking inter-conflicts…
Checking keyring…
Checking integrity…
Loading package files…
Checking file conflicts…
Failed to commit transaction:
conflicting files:

• /etc/skel/.xinitrc exists in both manjaro-gnome-settings and manjaro-kde-settings

I’ve made my homeworks and gone through this:

Update or package installation returns “Failed to commit transaction (conflicting files); FILENAME exists in filesystem”

I can’t install or update a package because I get (something like) this: error: could not prepare transaction error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) libname: /insert/file/name/here exists in filesystem Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded. Why is this happening? The package manager, pacman, has detected an unexpected file already exists on disk. By design it will not overwrite files that already exist. This is a design feature, not a flaw - package managers are desig…

…which lead me to renaming /etc/skel/.xinitrc into /etc/skel/.xinitrc.old

Yet the second spin of upgrading from PAMAC returned the very same error…hmmmm.

Time to see if there was a concurrent ownership claimed by multiple packages at the same time.

pacman -Qo /etc/skel/.xinitrc
/etc/skel/.xinitrc is owned by manjaro-gnome-settings 20200512-1

…while I am using KDE…! So I should have given PAMAC more credit (“the same file exists in 2 packages” that are meant to be used in an exclusive manner…that is…one at a time!).

Knowing that this would possibly break the other (unused) DE installed on my machine (GNOME), I had to swallow the bullet and try to see if removing the elements causing co-ownership of xinitrc would solve the issue:

sudo pacman -R manjaro-gnome-assets
sudo pacman -R manjaro-gnome-settings

Then I crossed my finger and re-used PAMAC to perform the hundreds upgrades…this time it did work.

But what’s gonna happen next time I have to eventually use GNOME? Will surely have to re-install the removed packages…

My question(s)

1. Will re-installing manjaro-gnome-assets and settings be enough to re-run GNOME?
2. Is there a better way to handle multiple DE co-existence (aka co-ownership of /etc/skel/.xinitrc) or should I surrender to the idea of completely uninstalling GNOME?

[Chrysostomus]

@th3f001

conflicting files:

• /etc/skel/.xinitrc exists in both manjaro-gnome-settings and manjaro-kde-settings

You shouldn’t have both of those installed. They should conflict with each other, but apparently there has been a mistake in the packaging.

You can safely uninstall one of them, they are only meant for the initial configuration of new users. I would uninstall kde settings, because gnome can be unpredictable.