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.