Saturday 13 January 2018

Kubuntu 17.10 Working. Solution seems to be - DON't use 'Slideshow Wallpaper'


Kubuntu 17.10 with Plasma 5 working at last!
Solution seems to be - DON't use 'Slideshow Wallpaper'

After so much time trying to fix memory issues with Plasma 5, I finally seem to have Plasma 5 and Kubuntu 17.10 working happily - for now. 
The worst culprit seems to have been using the Slideshow option for Wallpaper in Configure Desktop.
I'm sure that could change, and I'm keeping Mint 17.3 with KDE Plasma 4 in the spare root partition for Justin.

I have mentioned before that I have a spare panel on the right side of my desktop mostly to make desktop switching easier by simply scrolling in the blank space at the right of the screen.  But I always liked having Docky running in hidden mode at the bottom for quick access to a few odd things that I use most often.  

In plasma 5, when I installed Docky it had some issues, so I did some snooping around and found 'Latte Dock'.

Check it out HERE



 Latte Dock was in the Kubuntu repository, and it works similarly to Docky, although it doesn't seem as versatile so far.  It did however blend nicely with my theme and in the top screen capture you can see it taking up most of the bottom of the screen - like Docky in Panel Mode.  It doesn't eat much of the system's resources and unlike Docky when I tried it, Latte Dock sits nicely on all my Virginal Desktops AND all my Activities.

Today I have been running most of my usual programs and even with KODI and Waterfox running RAM used after five hours was only up to 2.1GiB and Swap used was zero.

This is a huge change because previously after a couple of hours the RAM was often up to 6GiB used and swap around the same!

Just for now, I am impressed with Kubuntu 17.10 and Plasma 5 for the first time ever in the years that I have been trying to use Plasma 5.

Below is the System Information for the Brix Celeron n3150 system I am using.


Day 2 of the Kubuntu 17.10 / Plasma 5.11 experiment and I have learned a few more things.  I kicked in a browser I have been messing around with - Vivaldi.  There are some things I don;t like about Vivaldi.  In fact I hate them /  One is that I can't find any way to open Speed Dial entries in new tabs with a left click.  Another is that I cannot use my double click actions on the Title Bar, for example Double Click to toggle shade does not work..

However in most other things, Vivaldi is faster and using a few less resources than most of the other high end browsers I have at the moment - even with some extensions installed.

Here's the RAM use comparison yesterday with Waterfox, and today with Vivaldi.



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