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.
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