Mint 19 KDE - Some more thoughts

I thought I should post some observations about Mint 19 KDE while they are fresh in my mind.

First, I think going with Mint 19 XFCE may have been a sensible idea.  I was tempted to use Mint 19 LXQT because of the QT widgets, but there's always the possibility that QT in Mint LXQT repositories and QT in kde-desktop and plasma-desktop in the repositories might be different versions, and clash with each other,  I hope that by using Mint XFCE as the base, the QT version installed when installing kde and plasma from its repositories should be all compatible.

So far it seems to be working.

Based on all my prior experience with distros running Plasma 5 I intended using Mint 19 with Plasma 5 as an occasional environment to experiment with until it became stable enough to use.  That would leave me with Mint 17.3 KDE as my daily desktop and KDE4.x is FAST.  But for the first time I can actually use Mint with Plasma 5 without major problems.  No memory leaks, no hang ups, other than having to turn file indexing OFF, to stop the system hogging a CPU core and flogging disk drives!.

My ONLY complaints now are that it is so bloody slow to boot, (it takes a good two minutes to boot to a usable desktop from power on.  Mint 17.3 KDE takes 19 seconds) and switching Activities is laggy.  And the Virtual Desktop system has been stuffed up.  In theory, Activities should replace Virtual Desktops with something more useful.  In reality, that worked in the later releases of KDE4.x, but it has been buggered up in Plasma 5.  It works - just not as well as in KDE4.

And I think I have mentioned before that there are times when Activities alone simply do not work in Plasma.   I have a number of programs that I use from time to time that are not written specifically for KDE/Plasma.  In Mint 17 KDE, I can have one of these open in an Activity and switch to another Activity and it is stuck on ALL activities.  So I simply switch it to a Virtual Desktop.   The same applies in Plasma 5.  But if the Plasma 5 team was to drop Virtual Desktops because they think Activities are all that is needed, I would have no way to put these misbehaving programs out of sight for a while.

As I reported previously, everything else is working nicely.  I now have Kde Image Menus integrated with Dolphin after much messing around.  And I can click an icon and have beautiful desktop Video Wallpaper.

Video Wallpaper is NOT something that is necessary, but now that we don't really need screen savers, it is a nice alternative, especially when using something like Sony or Samsung OLED or QLED demo videos (downloaded from YouTube).  I use a cheap (under $500) 50 inch LED monitor.  Watching these 4k demo videos even on my 1080p cheap screen, make me wonder why I would ever bother buying a 4k TV.

Linux Mint 19 Tara KDE follow up

In my last post I saw that I had some kind of graphics glitch that was creating a weird double image in my translucent menus, so most of the entries appeared doubled.  I'm not sure what fixed it, but I did play with stuff like rendering in the compositor settings.  I am currently using XRender, rather than GL, and this doesn't seem to have affected much, other than possibly clearing the problem.  I just noticed it is working properly again, so at some time I will have to see if I can replicate the problem and see what fixed it.

I now have a more stable and useful installation of Linux with Plasma 5 than I have ever had previously running Mint 18.x KDE or even when trying Kubuntu or Neon.  Even Mint 19 Cinnamon with Plasma installed afterwards was hopeless.

It seems the way to go is to install Mint 19 Tara XFCE, then install the kde-plasma-desktop and  plasma-desktop.  I ended up scrolling around Synaptic and installing a bit of other stuff to do with Plasma 5 that was not automatically added, but overall it was not as difficult as I have experienced before.

I'm still tweaking things, but I'm happy with the way it works at the moment.  It is a bit laggy compared with Mint 17.3 KDE, but this is the first time I have had a late version of Mint with Plasma 5 working properly.  There's still an issue with Google-Earth, but that is mostly to do with Google's dropping the standalone platform and forcing us to use Chrome Browser to run Google-Earth.  Obviously so they can track our viewing for data mining porpoises.

Everything else seems stable.  I have all my transparency stuff, and wallpapers on each activity.  Plasma 5 doesn;t allow separate virtual desktop wallpapers, but I can live with that.  The only reason I can see to have Activities AND Virtual Desktops is still because some programs tend to stick to ALL ACTIVITIES, with no way to turn that behaviour off.  For those, I open them in a separate desktop, then do everything else in activities on the main desktop.  It's clumsy compared to KDE4, but it works ok.

So overall I'm happy with the way it turned out.  Actually, more than just happy.  After failing to get a workable Plasma 5 desktop with Kubuntu and KDE Neon, and with Mint Cinnamon and Plasma 5, I was becoming a little concerned for my future computing.

The alternatives might have worked ok on higher end systems, but as usual, I am only using a Celeron.  I've always pushed what I can get out of lower end systems and it is even more important so now that I am retired and on a tighter budget.

The desktop wallpapers were taken using a second hand ($250) Panasonic Lumix FX70 camera, and lightly post processed using DarkTable for Linux to bring out the highlights just enough to make a reasonable wallpaper.  Then they were compressed/resized using KIM (Kde Image Menu) so they load faster.  KIM adds a right click service menu to the Dolphin file manager in KDE4, but it can also be installed in Plasma 5 (with a bit of messing around.  It used ImageMagick scripts to perform the Iimage Manupulation operations.

Linux MInt and decent AUDIO

Like many people, these days I don;t run a separate audio or theatre system.  My main day to day computer since I retired, is a little Gigabyte BRIX and my monitor is a cheap (well under $500) 50 inch HD LED TV.

That gives me great videos and with movies and even YouTube available in HD now, the only thing I was missing was good sound.  For mp3 playback, I have always just chosen an audio program with an equalizer option, but that didn't help with say, playing a music DVD or a movie.

I have a dual sound system made up of a pair of Logitech stereo speaker systems, each with its own Sub Woofter.  That gives me the depth of sound I want  at a very affordable price, since I've had the speaker systems for about ten years.

Today I discovered someone has created a nice equalizer that works brilliantly with PulseAudio, (which is something I always install anyway):

It can be installed by doing the following in a terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-equalizer

As usual, I copied the .deb file in case I ever lose the ppa, or want to remove/ disable it.

Packages you installed manually will be in   /var/cache/apt/archive/  so I just copy them into a software downloads folder.

Once it is installed it will be in the menu under Multimedia.

I modified my settings like the image below for the speaker set I have, but there are plenty of presets to use as a start point.