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Hi there, I'm thinkering around with a problem for which I found a solution, however, my solution feels a bit messy so I wanted to ask if there's a simpler way of achieving what I want.
Situation:
I have a convertible device (Surface Go3) which runs Arch Linux with a heavily customized Plasma environment. I changed the look and feel of the Plasma shell in a way that it resembles a smartphone/tablet OS instead of a traditional setup. I'm using this setup for years and am fine with it.
Problem:
I have a thunderbolt dock and two monitors, keyboard, mouse... which I can connect my device to. When connected, I want Plasma to have a traditional desktop look and feel.
But the differences between desktop and tablet mode are massive and cannot be solved by using activities or virtual desktops.
A display manager can handle multiple sessions with different desktop environments, but it cannot handle two different Plasma dessions for one user. So, how can I switch between two different Plasma sessions?
Sure, I can add a second user to my machine which has different Plasma dotfiles in his home folder, however, this would complicate things in others ways.
My current messy solution:
My solution was to have different dotfiles for tablet and desktop modes and use a systemd service to mount the correct dotfiles before starting Plasma.
The service decides which dotfiles to mount by reading /proc/cmdline.
Could you think of a better solution?
Last edited by lugge (2025-09-25 12:40:39)
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