Mint 19 KDE at December 2018 with Video of xwinwrap in action)

I have posted a lot about my fight to get a decent Plasma 5 desktop so that I can update from KDE4 and Mint 17.  In the process I have installed and tested Mint 18, Kubuntu, KDE Neon and various other alternatives, but until I managed to get Plasma 5 desktop installed on Mint 19 XFCE - nothing worked smoothly on a fairly low end Celeron system.

I posted an update here recently that said I was finally happy with the way this combination works.  So this time I have decided not to be so lazy, and because I wanted to try Command Line desktop video capture, I recorded a 15 minute video of my Mint 19 Plasma desktop the way it is currently set up, using ffmpeg from a terminal.

Here is the code for the terminal command:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -video_size 1680x1050 -framerate 15  -i :0.0 -c:v libx264 -qp 0  -preset ultrafast screentest04-15fps.mp4

I ran it from a terminal opened in the Dolphin folder where I wanted the video capture to be saved.

Here is the Desktop Screen Recording made by ffmpeg.  I did not bother with audio, but I typed some information into OpenOffice Writer because I was planning to show that anyway.

Video of Mint 19 XFCE with Plasma 5

Base Operating System is Mint 19 XFCE.  Plasma 5 desktop was added by searchin in synaptic for plasma desktop, kde desktop and plasma 5 and selecting whatever looked obvious from the results.  As mentioned previously, there's a lot of 'How To' information on YouTube.  The biggest thing was finding a base distro that worked.  Using XFCE gave me a QT based distro but without 'clashes' in the version of QT widgets.  Using GTK based distros like Mate and Cinnamon caused problems.

From there I found some Themes I liked for my transparent title bars and panels.  Then I installed my usual extras like Shantz-xwinwrap and KIM (KDE Image Management for resizing and compressing images in Dolphin)

I found all my Bash scripts for xwinwrap worked fine, and all I changed was from full screen video to an oval 'port hole' so that the original still image wallpaper on each 'Activity' gabe me a quick reference to which Activity I was on.  Mint 17 KDE allows both Virtual Desktops AND Activities to have individual wallpaper.  Plasma 5 only allows Activities to have individual wallpaper.

On the other hand, while Activities are better in many respects than Virtual Desktops, at this stage it is necessary to have at least 2 Virtual Desktops so that the odd non-KDE program that tends to take over ALL Activities, can be opened in its own desktop.

OK, I've written lots about the journey.The video above shows the arrival!

And below are the specs for my Mint 19 KDE system