Wednesday 25 December 2019

Things I like about XFCE.


As I mentioned previously I have decided to use Linux Mint XFCE as my desktop environment for the second hand Lenovo M93p Tiny computer.  For a long time I have preferred the KDE Desktop, and until the shift from Plasma 4.x to plasma 5.x, KDE was more or less everything one could ask for in a Desktop operating system.

It was Fast.  It seemed infinitely configurable.  It seemed to have a wonderful selection of programs and applets that worked seamlessly with it, some of which felt nicer than those of other environments like Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate etc.

But then came Plasma 5 by KDE.  Having gone through the transition form KDE 3 to KDE 4 I knew that for a while KDE 4 got horribly slow and clunky before it magically got back to its old 'snappy' self.
So I 'knew' Plasma 5 would do the same thing - eventually.

But it didn't!  It was only when I was setting up the M93p Tiny, that GRUB picked up the Plasma 5 entries on my 500GB SATA HDD that had been in the Brix before I bought the SSD, and let me boot into them, that I began to realise just how slow and cumbersome Plasma 15 or 16 or whatever it is now, is.

I had been playing with the idea of Elementary OS when the accidental dual boot thing happened.  I found Elementary to be still so bad that I tried Peppermint Linux out of curiosity.  It was really horrible.  And that was the point where I noticed GRUB had picked up the Plasma entries.  So I booted into one.

First, it took forever to boot.  After it booted, I rebooted, and it was just as bad.  Then I went through the thing where I clicked on something and waited for it to load.  I really had become used to all this simply because I had persisted.  And there was still an entry on the old drive for KDE 4.
I booted into that and it was fast, everythign opened as soon as I clicked it.  WOW!!  This was the KDE I loved.  Back into Plasma 5 and aaarrrggghhh!!!!!

So I sat back and thought about Linux Distros I has played with.  I still use Raspberry Pis for fun, and I like the responsiveness of LXDE.  But I don't like that I can't personalise it.  However I did test out Manjaro Linux on the Pi and it was quite a lot of fun, and it allowed me to set things up my way, a lot more then I could with LXDE.

So maybe an XFCE distro would be good on the M93p Tiny.  I decided to try an old favourite - Mint XFCE.
And I am pleased to say I am very happy with it.  Sure there are things KDE does better.  But many of the things KDE used to do better, are so much slower these days.  It is no good having some fancy compositing tweaks, then sacrificing all your responsiveness for cutesy stuff.

If KDE ever gets Plasma 5 to the sale level of useability as Plasma 4, maybe I will go back.  In the mean time, I am enjoyiing tweaking XFCE.

And all the things like my desktop Video Wallpapers?


Well, they don;t work full screen like they did on Plasma 5.  But they do work nicely in an oval window.   So I can still have a video playing through a port hole on my desktop, and if I want to click on desktop icons I just place them around the port hole.

I'm sure I'll remember the fix to show icons on full screen video.

Monday 23 December 2019

BIGGEST Waves Ever!!! 4 Days Living At Sea



I found this on YouTube.
Made me a bit homesick for living aboard...

Lenovo M93p Tiny PC


For a lot of my computing life between about 1990 to 2007 I was heavily involved in IBM computers after working for them and with them in the 80s.

My computers here leftover from my businesses are mostly IMB Lenovo, the a small scattering of Compaq and an old Acer 5315 laptop I acquired for one of my yachts.

A few years ago I wanted something affordable with USB 3 ports, so I acquired the Gigabyte Brix, with its quad core Celeron and 4 x USB 3 ports.  For quite a while I've wanted a second small form factor computer to supplement the Brix should anything happen to it.  I looked at the various Intel NUC boxes, but they were all pretty pricey.



This year, while my son was visiting he saw some Lenovo M93p Tiny computers advertised on eBay for a little under $200 including post.  They are all about 4 years old and ex-lease.  We ordered one each.

The Lenovo Tiny is a little under 200mm each side and about 40mm thick.  My M93p has an Intel Haswell  i5-4590T  CPU with a clock speed of 2GHz and Turbo of 3GHz.  There was an option of a 4570T, ut despite being consoderably faster at clock and turbo speeds, it is only 2 cores, and it has a considerably slower GPU.

For my use, especially with lots of video and graphics editing, I thought the 4 cores and faster graphics performance was the best decision.

It came with a 128GB SSD installed, and once it arrived I hooked up the original Brix 500GB SATA HDD through a USB port.  While I was messing around deciding which operating system i was going to use, I discovered GRUB had picked up the old operating systems I'd had on the Brix before I bought the 500GB Crucial SSD for it.

So in between tests of a few Linux operating systems, I could boot the old drive and run lots of my old stuff.  I tried Elementary OS HERA (the latest release) and while it is pretty and fast, I soon realised why I stopped using it.  It is simply too inflexible.

I tried a new one called Peppermint.  It was awful.  After checking out those fast operating systems, and in between, booting into my old Kubuntu and Mint systems with Plasma 15 and 16 on them, I realised how much I like the snappy response of some of the light weight desktops.
One that I had not used in a long time, but I had liked a lot in the old days, was XFCE.  I downloaded Mint 19.2 FCE and booted from a live USB 2 thumb drive.  It was great, so I installed it.  I had forgotten how easy it is to configure.  I soon had it set up almost as nice as Plasma, and even had my video desktop wallpaper (all the shell scripts were on my old HDD).

A bonus is that the 4 core i5 4590T processor is quite fast enough for running 2160p (4k) videos in webm format.  It looks incredible on the $500  Big W -  EKO brand UHD TV.


The Lenovo M93p Tiny has a couple of interesting little tricks.  One is that if you set it up properly, one of the USB 3 ports is specially designed to turn the computer ON using the Keyboard.  Leaving the computer plugged in after shutting down, a simple ALT + p  on the keyboard will turn the computer ON for you.  The correct USB 3 port has a tiny emblem of a keyboard next to it. (The middle USB port next to the VGA port).

There is another neat thing available if you are leaving the computer plugged in.  On the front face, one of the USB ports is Yellow instead of the usual Blue for USB 3.

The Yellow port (on the Right) stays LIVE.  You can plug a Phone or other USB powered device, to charge it.

Lots of these very small computers are available at the moment as they come off lease from big corporate environments,


Display is via one VGA port, and two 'Display Port' sockets.  You need to buy a DPI to HDMI adapter cable to use this computer with HDMI, but they are only a few dollars.

The display on a 55 inch UHD TV is fantastic.