How to install other DEs in Nitrux

By 23 April, 2021October 9th, 2026News and Tutorial Archive

Update 09/10/26: The information below is for an older release of this distribution and does not apply to the current release.

Today’s tutorial shows how to install another desktop environment in Nitrux with Distrobox. For this example, we’ll install and use GNOME.

Note that the Distrobox developer considers using Distrobox for this purpose an experiment.

That said, here’s how you can add other DEs to Nitrux.

Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆

📜 Table of Contents

  1. Installing a different Desktop Environment X11
  2. Troubleshooting
    1. Launching applications from the GNOME Overview doesn’t work

First, some context: what is a desktop environment? In computing, a desktop environment (DE) implements the desktop metaphor of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that shares a standard graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell.

Installing a different Desktop Environment (X11)

Following up on our Distrobox tutorial, we will use the container we created to install GNOME. The following command installs the GNOME meta-package, which includes GNOME Shell and various GNOME apps such as Nautilus, Rhythmbox, Tweaks, and Software.

  • 🔰 Information: The meta-package may not include other software or artwork you expect, so install it.
distrobox enter --name debian-stable-distrobox -- sudo apt install gnome

After the installation completes, we must create a session file. We tested using an X11 session, as adding the session file to the Wayland sessions directory didn’t work.

>> distrobox-gnome.desktop printf "%s\n" \
'[Desktop Entry]' \
'Name=GNOME Distrobox (X11)' \
'Comment=This session logs you into GNOME Distrobox (X11)' \
'Exec=distrobox enter --name debian-stable-distrobox -- /usr/bin/gnome-session' \
'TryExec=distrobox enter --name debian-stable-distrobox -- /usr/bin/gnome-session' \
'Type=Application' \
'DesktopNames=GNOME' \
'X-GDM-SessionRegisters=true'

sudo mv distrobox-gnome.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/

Then, create a script that attempts to correct the X11 socket permissions so the container can display graphical output when you log in to the GNOME session.

>> fix_tmp.sh printf "%s\n" \
'chown -f -R $USER:$USER /tmp/.X11-unix'

sudo mv fix_tmp.sh /etc/profile.d/

Then log out and log back into GNOME.

Et voila!. If you’d like to install other desktop environments or window managers, we’ll list some of the meta-packages available in Debian.

  • 🔰 Information: If you’re using another Linux distribution for your container, please refer to each distribution’s package search method to find the appropriate name of the meta-packages.
  • 🔰 Information: We used Debian 12 for this tutorial; if you want to use a newer version of GNOME (or other desktop environments or window managers), create a container with distributions such as Debian unstable, Fedora Rawhide, Arch Linux, Gentoo, NixOS, Alpine Linux, etc.

Troubleshooting

Launching applications from the GNOME Overview doesn’t work

For an unknown reason (possibly due to DBus), launching some applications from the Overview doesn’t work out of the box; to alleviate this problem, remove %U from Exec= in all launchers in /usr/share/applications within the container. If you’re in the GNOME session, you’re inside the container, and you can enter the command starting with sudo [...]

  • 🔰 Information: It’s necessary to edit the desktop launchers every time users install a new application in the container; it’s better to automate this task; this is not a Nitrux bug.
distrobox enter --name debian-stable-distrobox -- sudo find /usr/share/applications -type f -name '*.desktop' -exec sed -i 's/%U//g' {} +

To use GNOME Software or Synaptic (if using the container in this tutorial), refer to the Distrobox tutorial on Issues with PolicyKit Authentication.

That’s it; this concludes today’s tutorial.

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