It's probably way past time I did an update here. A lot has been happening in my life, including changing some of my computers, catching a dose of CoVid, a couple of other health dramas and various other glitches.
On top of that Google has had a major glitch with the Blogger platform that saw them sending out emails advising people that the code on the pages of Blogger posts was formatted incorrectly or some other such rubbish. This on 'Blogger', where of course, they themselves provide all the code and we just type content and pop in a few photographs etc using their tools!
So I just haven't been in the mood for messing around with their rubbish. However this site still pops up when people do a search on certain topics, so I'll do some more updates.
A month or more ago when the Xfce people advised that Xfce 4.18 was ready, I managed to install it on Mint 21.1 and test it in anticipation of Mint 21.2 using 4.18. About the same time the Minit team announced it would indeed be in 21.2, so I was happy to find a couple of useful items in the new Xfce 4.18.
Most were not all that exciting, but the big one for me was the return of panel 'Profiles', allowing users to easily backup their Panel layout.
At first glance this is not a big deal unless you screw up your panel and have to recover it, but think about it for a moment. You can set up a number of different panel layouts with different Icons and Apps ready for quick use - and switch between them quickly when you want to work on specific projects.
It is a bit like a poor man's Plasma Activities, albeit without the way Activities can save all the open Apps for a session. So, the ability to rescue a lost panel is certainly a great idea, and it was briefly available previously. However, although I haven't tested it for that particular porpoise, the ability to set up a number of Panel Profiles and quickly switch between them could be fantastic, either for specific projects, for Multimedia or for enabling specific Panel layouts to be applied by different users sharing a computer.
The other main focus of my recent activities has been swapping my main daily machines around. The Lenovo m93p Tiny is now my secondary computer accessed through NoMachine VNC, and the Lenovo m900 Tiny has become the main system.
It sort of made sense, because although the m93p has a higher Turbo speed, the m900 is newer and a little faster in other ways.
Both systems were updated to 16GB RAM and 2TB SSDs as well, and both are now connected to a bank of mixed external SSDs and magnetic drives via some Powered Hubs. That allows 18 external drives to be hooked up through hubs while another 20 or so TB of drives can be swapped in through the USB3 ports if needed.
I've got Mint 21.2 running KDE 5 nicely, and switched out Plasma's Kwin Windows Manager for Compiz - which performs so much better than anything else, at least until Wayland matures enough for daily use (hopefully some time this century).
Mint 21.2 Xfce with KDE 5 running Compiz on the Lenovo m900 Tiny:
And again:
Ditto:
Below, the Lenovo m900 Tiny as it is currently:
So far it is all pretty well bullet proof. About the only disappointment is that switching the Window Manager from Kwin to Compiz means I lose Plasma's 'Activities', and even though most people don;t use them, I used to find them useful.
I did notice however, that the m93p, when it was started today, opened up with a particular set of Apps I'd left open when I shut it down yesterday, opened up with each App where I'd left it and with the data intact - even though I hadn't saved it. that was as soon as I switched to Compiz (using the Fusion-Icon).
I haven't seen that happen before, so it bears looking into.
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