But every time I ran Plasma, I had problems. Mint 18 versions running KDE Plasma were unreliable, Plasma itself was flawed, and trying Kubuntu and even KDE Neon, both of which run Plasma 5, were problems.
I even gave up and tried other Linux distributions, but Clem and the team have done so much great work with Mint, that I just prefer the stability and overall feel of Mint.
Then recently came the bombshell announcement. Mint would no longer create a KDE/Plasma release!
So I tried Mint 19 Cinnamon and hated it. I know Cinnamon is Mint's flagship, but I simply don't like Gnome style stuff. I tried an old faithful, XFCE, this time Mint 19 XFCE. I had the same problem there as with Cinnamon. I simply couldn;t ge tthe look and feel I enjoy, especially considering I am still running it on my Brix with a Celeron processor.
While I was there however, I decided to install Plasma 5 from the suppositories. And I was pleasantly surprised when it picked up all the appearance and theming I had left in my home directory from a few years experimenting with Plasma off and on. That was a pleasant start. As I have mentioned before I always set up two root partitions, one with my main OS and one for experiments or new releases. That lets me simply edit one line in /etc/default/grub to choose the default boot OS once decide to use the new one as my regular main OS. And it picks up all my defaults for programs as I install them.
The only things I have not been able to fix, that I previously had working, are the KIM (K Image Management) context menu additions in the Dolphin File Manager. That annoys me because I had it working previously in Plasma 5. And the persistent logging out after a few minutes of screen inactivity. I have disabled all power management settings I can find in both XFCE and PLASMA (I can now simply log out of one and back into the other if I need to).
However, I have found a once per session fix, and I will write about that in the next blog entry, so it should show up on a Google search if anyone else has the problem. Briefly though, there is now a 'Battery' icon in my system tray, even though the Brix does not have a battery. Clicking that and clicking again shows an option to enable or disable Power Management - independently of the stuff in System Settings > Power.
So at the beginning of any session I just go in there and uncheck to disable it. It is annoying to haver to remember to do it, and I can;t find a way disable it by default, but at least it is available.
And the first time each day that I forget, I remember as soon as the system drops to the login screen :-)
I have done all the usual stuff like installing xwinwrap so I have my video wallpapers, and installing smplayer, then mpv, and editing smplayer preferences to use mpv instead of mplayer, so I can run my xwinwrap video wallpaper on my desktop, and still use smplayer to play a music video as I am doing at the moment.
I have my transparent Plasma themes, so menus and panels are translucent. I also can;t add the kde-gtk editor I normally use for font matching across programs. For now I have that solved using the scaling function on my System Settings > Display and Monitor. And for some programs like Darktable (an open source replacement for Lightroom) I can edit the fonts in the /home/.config/programnamerc file for each program.
Here's the system usage with some programs open while I am writing this post, and with xwinwrap (using mplayer) video wallpaper running on all Activities and a video playing in smplayer (using mpv).
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