Right. But cleaning up the old files left over from swapping your DE is much easier if you actually have read and write access to those files. When you swap DEs, it’s gonna leave shit behind whether you’re atomic or not. But atomic systems have more barriers to cleaning them up, to prevent the user from accidentally cleaning the wrong things.
The dotfiles between GNOME and KDE are the same, the base image doesn’t matter, if you try to switch DE’s on old distros you have the same problem.
Right. But cleaning up the old files left over from swapping your DE is much easier if you actually have read and write access to those files. When you swap DEs, it’s gonna leave shit behind whether you’re atomic or not. But atomic systems have more barriers to cleaning them up, to prevent the user from accidentally cleaning the wrong things.
All of the affected files are in the user’s home directory, not on the system.
This just isn’t true. There are tons of dependencies that are going to get left all over the place