Kubuntu 19 with Plasma 5 and pulse-audio-equalizer

2019 April 12th
There were more updates to Kubuntu 19.04 this morning.  About the only problem I have so far is, as mentioned on the last post, that each time there is an update, pulseaudio-gtk is updated and of course, will no longer work.

This is not specific to Kubuntu 19 - it was happening to Jubuntu 18.x updates as well.  But with those I could use the pin command to set the pulseaudio-equlizer to a specific version. But since Kubuntu 19.04 it applies the new version over the pinned / locked / forced version (yep, I have tried pinning, locking and forcing).

The method outlined yesterday of dragging a link to the package onto my panel is working nicely though, and it is almost automatic now, as soon as I have applied updates, to see if clicking the PulseAudio-Equalizer icon loads the equalizer.  If it comes up with the GTK error, I simply click the package icon, enter a password and wait a few seconds.  Then I click the Equalizer icon and so far, it loads the Equalizer every time.

The only other problem I've had so far with Kubuntu 19.04 is that it sometimes forgets the screen dimensions or layout or refresh rate.  But these types of glitches are to be expected and I have not reported them yet as they often only happen once or twice.

All in all, a nice smooth transition to the latest Kubuntu, and a smooth transition away from Linux Mint - albeit, sadly after so many years.

Kubuntu 19.04 BETA

This month the Beta of Kubuntu 19 was released and after a little fiddling with repositories I managed to get it installed over the top of Kubuntu 18.10.
One of the annoyances at the moment is that after spending time getting the equalizer working for PulseAudio, every time there are system updates, the equalizer wants to update.  And every time it updates it is missing the -gtk files to show the equalizer window.

The pulseaudio-equalizer package in the repositories is missing the required files, and although I tried forcing it, and locking it and even pinning it, the package keeps showing up as an update. As soon as it updates, I get the missing equalizer-gtk error.

A little sideways thinking, and I put a copy of the deb file (pulseaudio-equalizer_2.7.0.2-5_webupd8_xenial0_all.deb) somewhere I can't accidentally delete it, then dragged its icon to a spot on a spare panel.
Now after an update, if the equalizer doesn;t load, and I click the menu item and it comes up with the -gtk error, all I have to do is click the icon on the panel and it will load the version that works.

And I have my custom settings for the sound system I use on the BRIX.

I've also got some - but not all - of my GTK apps (like LibreOffice) running a similar dark theme to the Kvantum theme I am using in Plasma 5. I have the ability to turn transparent windows (like the file icon background in Dolphin etc) on or off with a couple of clicks. But by far the thing I like most about Kvantum is that I can have a dark theme with 3D look buttons and a rounded accent to stuff like buttons and menu highlights.
I'll put some screenshots below.

On a final note, I was having some serious flickering of the cursor and a few other graphical glitches. I wasn't sure if there was a problem with screen refresh, or if my LED TV was dying. Then I remembered I had switched the compositor over to GL 3.1 to check the blur effect in Plasma 5.15 since Cosmic.

It turns out that the onboard iNtel graphics on the BRIX aren't quite up to the stress, which surprises me since xrender these days apparently relies on GL to do some of its work. Anyway, swapping back to xrender seems to have alleviated the problem for now.