Mint 19 KDE (Plasma Desktop installed on XFCE)

[rossdv8]

My MInt 17.3 KDE was working well, but I have been looking for something to bring it up to date. After lots of problems with Mint 18.x KDE, I decided to ditch KDE/Plasma and use another Mint desktop. I tried Mate and Cinnamon with all their new features, and hated them just as much as I did in the early days of Mint. So I thought perhaps I should just leave Mint altogether. SO I tried Kubuntu and KDE Neon. I even messed with things like ElementaryOS again. But in the end I went back to good old Mint 17.3 KDE.

Now, I have two root partitions on my main drive. One had my current everyday OS, and another has anything I want to try out, which makes it simple to install a complete new OS without using a VM. It has its downside as far as Progrems in my ~/home are concerned, but it works mostly. I tried installing KDE Plasma Desktop 5 on Mint 19 Cinnamon and Mate and both failed to work properly for me (various clashes with components - mainly GTK). One day I decided to try installing it on Mint 19 XFCE, and gradually got everything I wanted, and with a little tweaking it is now almost as fast and smooth on my Celeron N3150 system woth 8GB RAM, as my Mint 17.3 (KDE4) installation.

Here's what it looks like. The video is a little jerky because I was playing video wallpaper, typing and recording the screen using ffmpeg from the command line, so the poor little BRIX was trying to play video and encode with ffmpeg at the same time. HOWEVER, the video playing in the ovals on the desktop in reality is completely smooth - even in UHD.

Now that it is all working nicely, it was time to make another donation (something I've neglected for a while until I got this working)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRRCVP1lngk

All my transparent theming works fine and speed is now acceptable. Stability is excellent after several months of testing. I'm using 5 'Activities', but I still have a couple of Virtual Desktops as well, because there are a few programs that don;t play well with Plasma 5, and take over every Activity otherwise. The solution is to open them on their own Desktop.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n1sIMxL2V1I/ ... 125505.png
How to install Plasma/KDE Desktop is written elsewhere in the forum by others. This is simply to show how it all comes together using Mint XFCE as the base. Hope it is helpful.

[rossdv8]

Just an Update
I recently made a few changes to my Mint 19 XFCE with Plasma 5. I added the Kubuntu Backports repo, then did an update and upgrade. Info Centre then showed my system as Kubuntu 19 instead of Mint 19, but aside from a couple of minor glitches that were easily fixed (to do with Kmixer and PulseAudio) it all went well.

Earlier today I used Mint Update Manager to update from Mint 19 to Mint 19.1. That also went smoothly and now my system thinks I am running Kubuntu 19.1 (obviously it doesn't exist yet).

[img]https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GzCRW89iPbA/ ... 00.png[img]

The good news is that is is working very smoothly, and quickly with CPU use average in 1% to 5% while Chromium is running with 8 tabs open, and ksysguard open on all desktops at the same time as I'm typing in LibreOffice. RAM gets to a Max of 2.3GB, but quickly drops to 1.8-2 with only 1 or 2 Tabs open. Closing Chromium drops RAM use to about 900MB with LibreOffice and a document open (while typing).

I know that by now all the things that were wrong with Kubuntu have probably been fixed. But with this set up I have a slick KDE/Plasma 5 desktop AND I can switch to XFCE any time simply by logging out, should I want to.

I was a little disappointed that Mint dropped KDE, but I am very pleased that it is so easy to add a fully functional and slick KDE/Plasma desktop back into Mint

Cheers,
RossD.