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.