My New Home – 356 days old

[ZemaTalon]

I went from Mint 11 Gnome2 to Mint 12 KDE & XFCE. Still trying to figure out configuring the bottom panel. I have Lancelot in place, but I'm still not totally satisfied with it's menu either. I'm used to a more simple menu I guess. I have better colors than I could ever get under Gnome, but text entry colors are way too light and hard to see in FF. Maybe another dark scheme would work better for that, but it's fine under Google Chrome. And as I'm typing this I get a popup saying desktop effects have been disabled because something was taking too long, and now things are acting weird, and some windows have lost their titlebars.... think I'm going to go configure XFCE now

desktop1.jpg

[Alakazam]

Dang, I thought you moved, that does look hard to read Zema. I'm still playing with XCFE in Slack, I haven't found all the stuff yet either.

[Bad Haircut]

Eh? Lancelot is simple..

[floppybootstomp]

I've been using Mint 12 KDE for a coupla months now and it does have a few quirks. I have the default Firefox plus Opera browser installed and I notice the address text in the address bar in Opera goes invisible when I hover the mouse over it. This makes it somewhat difficult to edit addresses. I'm using a very dark colour scheme which I like but that scheme makes Libre Office Word text colour default dark blue on a black background which obvioulsy makes things a bit difficult to read. Sometimes I can change the text colour, sometimes I can't.

Prior to this best Mint version I had used was 11, 12/KDE deffo has a few anomalies but by and large I quite like it.

[ZemaTalon]

Actually I've found the darker screens with white text pretty easy to read, but some text entry boxes are still going to have a white background, especially on forums. Chrome handles that properly, using dark text with good contrast, but FF uses very faint text nearly as light as the background. Anyway I'm in XFCE now. I think I like this better, even before I configure it. Eye candy is great and all, but I don't like flakyness and at the end of the day I just need to get stuff done, so probably this is where I'll spend most of my time. There's just no substitute for stability. Gnome always seemed like a happy medium to me, but that's all out the window now.

[ZemaTalon]

Eh? Lancelot is simple..

This, is simple

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This thing has turned out to be buggy as hell, things are crashing at the drop of a hat. I think I'm going to remove the themes I installed, and if that doesn't do it, turn off compositing.

[Dark Angel]

I know some people really like KDE, each to their own. Personally I'm not a fan. I'd rather XFCE. That's a great thing about Linux. Don't like the desktop environment? No problem, just install a different one!

[Bad Haircut]

This, is simple

Untitled.png

This thing has turned out to be buggy as hell, things are crashing at the drop of a hat. I think I'm going to remove the themes I installed, and if that doesn't do it, turn off compositing.

So how comes you didn't just right click on the standard KDE Kickoff menu and select traditional KDE 3.xx menu - which is exactly the same.

[Bad Haircut]

This thing has turned out to be buggy as hell, things are crashing at the drop of a hat. I think I'm going to remove the themes I installed, and if that doesn't do it, turn off compositing.

You haven't got Compiz up and running have you?

[ZemaTalon]

So how comes you didn't just right click on the standard KDE Kickoff menu and select traditional KDE 3.xx menu - which is exactly the same.

That's what that's a pic of, which I enabled after asking myself the same question

[ZemaTalon]

You haven't got Compiz up and running have you?

I don't remember doing that, I don't recall even seeing it anywhere in the setttings. Desktop effects were on by default, and I've since turned them off in an attempt to stabilize it. I think I need a guide on how to tweak stuff in KDE without breaking stuff

[Bad Haircut]

Thas the usual culprit anyway. See what 13 brings they might have made progress with the fine detail and whatnot. I know a straight KDE distro with minimal effects looks superb and is fast as fook (faster than Xubuntu for example) and is rock solid stable. Fuck nose why most distros can't get it right.

[ZemaTalon]

I'm going to play around with it some more over the weekend, right now I'm hanging out in XFCE, but hopefully I'll end up spending more time in KDE

[Bad Haircut]

Chakra did a nice job on default distro effects. Minimal and not too heavy but just enough to make it pleasing to the eye. Why don't you run it in VB and steal all the default settings and play with 'em in Mint if you get time.

[ZemaTalon]

Chakra did a nice job on default distro effects. Minimal and not too heavy but just enough to make it pleasing to the eye. Why don't you run it in VB and steal all the default settings and play with 'em in Mint if you get time.

I just now captured all the default Chakra effects settings

[ZemaTalon]

Chakra has slightly more conservative settings than Mint. But I noticed in Chakra under Desktop Effects, under the general tab, "enable desktop effects at startup" was unchecked by default

[Bad Haircut]

Ah. Yes, you shoud run sudo pacman -Syu first for the system to update itself to current and then enable. Forgot all about that.

[Bad Haircut]

You'll get minimal , as in KISS, with Chakra, until you do shit with it.

[ZemaTalon]

Got all updates and rebooted, but still effects were off, so I turned them on, and got a message that they couldn't be turned on, figured maybe something to do with the fact I'm running it in a VM. So then I decide to re-enable desktop effects in Mint, and the same thing happens there. I go back to the main settings screen which informs me that OpenGL composting has crashed KWin in the past and therefore disabled to protect it. Suggestions are to try a different vid driver or use the XRender backend in place of OpenGL. I'm using the "recommended" vid driver, but there are several newer ones avail, maybe I'll try one of them. Incidentally, I also had problems with composting in XFCE (everything was slow) and I ended up turning it off there as well. So maybe the driver is the culprit

[Bad Haircut]

yeh, you do have to turn them on manually - but when done, they should just appear, like turning the lights on

Interesting.

[ZemaTalon]

I installed a newer driver, and all seems stable so far. I don't know for sure it was that or the slightly more conservative settings, but XFCE had problems too and in XFCE the composting settings are pretty simple. So I'm leaning towards the driver

[Bad Haircut]

I know some people really like KDE, each to their own. Personally I'm not a fan. I'd rather XFCE. That's a great thing about Linux. Don't like the desktop environment? No problem, just install a different one!

I don't have a problem with that, DA. I do have a problem when I read around the web and read blatant BS about KDE, and it can't do this, can't do that, is a fat bastard, is slow, etc etc. None of it true.