Why do templates like fedora-36 come with their own desktop environment?

I can not quite understand desktop environments in qubes os. I see the standard desktop environment of qubes os is xfce. But why do templates like fedora-xx (gnome) and fedora-xx-xfce (xfce) come with their own desktop environment? Isn’t it dead weight? What sense is there to have a certain desktop environment within a template? All I have on my desktop is programs running in certain qubes which fill their respective window completely and these windows as I understand live in the qubes desktop environment which I assume is by default xfce? It is not that I am opening little independent desktops when using different qubes (and I am glad it is the way it is). Am I thinking something fundamentally wrong?
Thank you for your help
M.

There are independent desktops - desktop environments, file managers, X servers, etc. along with their respective versions shipped by a distribution. So when running guests based on different templates you can use e.g. multiple GNOME versions at the same time.

It’s just that everything is virtualized in a seamless way.

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Thanks for clearing this up. Still seems a little bloated & waste of resources to me, but I understand that qubes developers will not make excessive modifications to the distros to save a little cpu & harddiskspace as qubes os has other priorities.

And you can use them, actually.

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If you’ve configured a non-dom0 GuiVM sys-gui(-gpu) then the desktop environment typically comes from an -xfce flavored TemplateVM.

As for the default template flavor, I guess it might just be intended to provide a reasonably close-to-defaults selection of preinstalled Gnome programs that are useful on their own, independent of which desktop environment they ultimately run in.

(And then there’s of course the -minimal flavor for micromanaging the software selection.)

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