[DESKTOP] Cinnamon, anyone?

[joneall]

I have been alternating between Cinnamon and KDE for the last couple of weeks. I really like Cinnamon, partly because it is a lot like KDE, at least the way I use it.

I typically have running amarok, thunderbird, 5 or 6 windows of SRware iron with 6-8 tabs in each, one or 2 libreoffice documents, one or two pdfs opened withn okulat and maybe more. With KDE, it absorbs almost all of my 8GB of memory. (I recently went from 4 to 8GB because of occasional crashes, which have practically disappeared.) With Cinnamon, it uses about half. That is obviously not a very quantitative measure, tho.

Of course, with CInnamon, I use workspaces as opposed to Plasma's activities. Frankly, the only difference this makes to me is that I cannot (yet) have different background images with cinnamon workspaces.

Aside from using less memory, the rest of the difference is pretty much details:

Cinnamon lets me arrange workspaces in the chooser as I like, and not just alphabetically.

I would like a few more applets/widgets in Cinnamon, in particular, a folder view and a graphic network monitor. This is no big deall, tho.

Anyone else have any opinions?

[Rod J]

I dunno ... I rarely use more than 4Gb of my 16Gb memory in Kubuntu 14.04 and that's with dozens of tabs open in two Firefox windows, Thunderbird, Libreoffice Writer open with a couple of large docs, a couple of spreadsheets and PDFs, etc. I don't how you're managing to use 8Gb although I don't know anything about "SRware" ... maybe it's a ram hog?

I have used Cinnamon in Mint 17.2 (Virtualbox machine) and it's OK ... but I still prefer KDE4 to it.

[joneall]

Iron is a repackaging of Google Chrome (or Chroium, I've never understood the difference.)

Right now, in KDE, plasmashel is using 1.5GB of memory! And 74 (!) Iron processes (the number of tabs I have open) are running about 5 GB.

Plasmashell is a memory hog. So is Iron, apparently. I found a web site which explains Chrome's RAM usage:

http://lifehacker.com/why-chrome-use...ram-1702537477

It is indeed because it opens a process for each tab, the goal being to avoid bringing down the whole thing if one tab hangs.

I will start Cinnamon with the same chrome config to compare the memory usage.

[GreyGeek]

I ran Mint 17 KDE for 3 months at the first of last year. It was OK. I experimented with Cinnamon but didn't like it. It was TOO friendly, in a Windows sort of way, and got in my way to prevent me from accessing what I wanted to do. I came back to KDE because it gave me the power and access to it.

I decided to try KDE Neon after they released the User Edition. Best move I ever made. For the first time in my computer experience my secondary GPU, GT650M, was treated and presented as my primary GPU, with no need to use bumblebee and giving me access to NVidia control screens. Steam's Universal Sandbox2 gives me 99fps and ALL simulations run with full particle experience and no lag. Minecraft gives me 175gps +-50. And NVidia's temperature never goes over 67C. KDE Neon is going will have to fold before I ever switch or stop using it.

[joneall]

I did not know about Neon. Sounds like it is a bleeding-edge thing, even beyond the KDE 4.14.16 I am running. Is plasma still a memory hog. (Mine is above 1GB.) But you think it is better. Can you convince me?

Don't understand what you mean by Cinnamon being too friendly, but you apparently want to do things I don't. I pretty much use standard applications + my own perl scripts + various bash commands (I adore the find command.).

Thanks for the reply.

[GreyGeek]

On my 8GB Acer the plasmashell takes 133Mb of RAM.
I'm on Plasma 5.9.2 and it is as stable as a rock. I've not had a single abend since I moved from Kubuntu to Neon.
My experience with Mint Cinnamon was that it behaved like WinX, "shielding" me from the settings I wanted to change by putting "friendly" but weak GUI's in front of me. It was a pain to drill down so I just jumped to the terminal. IMO, it assumes the user is a noob and presets about everything automatically. Nothing wrong with that, but that can be done without making hoops to jump through when Cinnamon doesn't quite figure out what I want to do. I had one "Bob" in my life and don't need another.

[vinnywright]

I did not know about Neon. Sounds like it is a bleeding-edge thing, even beyond the KDE 4.14.16 I am running.

in Neon we have KDE 5.32.0



VINNY

[joneall]

Neon install hangs detecting file systems

I don't know where else to pose this question, so I will try here. Feel free to redirect me.

After reading Greygeek on Neon, I decided to try it. I downloaded neon-userltsedition-20170202-0803-amd64.iso from the User LTS version (Neon 5.8).

First question: Which version should I have taken? User LTS or User edition?

I checked both sha1 and md5 sums and both were good. I then wrote it to a USB key with

dd if=neon-userltsedition-20170202-0803-amd64.iso od=/dev/sdd1 b=16M & sync

(Without the sync, the result would not boot.) I again checked the md5 and sha1 sums on the memory key, again ok.

I tried one install without the updates but with 3rd party software. After manual disk config, it ran for about a half hour, then hung with the message

Detecting file systems... 100%

I repeated the install, same way, but with neither updates nor 3rd party software. This time, the install hung right away with the same message.

Another question: It is not easy to find the USB key in the list of devices. At least two try to install Neon. But one goes into the graphic interface, whereas the other asks for a login. Login as what? Which version to use/

Thanks for any help -- or for sending me elsewhere to look for the solution.

[Snowhog]

My suggestion, and what I always do, is to install without updates and without 3rd party software; those get done after I have successfully installed. Also, are you connected to the 'Net via wire (not using a wireless connection)?

[joneall]

Yes, by wire. Thanks for the tip. Problem is, that does not work either.

[GreyGeek]

I never use dd to create a LiveUSB stick. Usually netbutin.

[joneall]

I don't know why, but I am having a dreadful time creating a USB key from the iso, even tho I have done it many times in the past. With dd, is the output device /dev/sdd or /dev/sdd1? Do I need a partition on there and, if so, should it be the whole drive or will, say, 2 GB do the job?

Thanks for your help.

[oshunluvr]

I don't know why, but I am having a dreadful time creating a USB key from the iso, even tho I have done it many times in the past. With dd, is the output device /dev/sdd or /dev/sdd1? Do I need a partition on there and, if so, should it be the whole drive or will, say, 2 GB do the job?

#1 is to verify the checksum of the .iso to insure you have a good download.

To your question above, normally you would use /dev/sdd in this case. The bootable ISO expects to be installed to the entire device. Otherwise, it cannot boot. As far as size goes, as long as the device is larger than the ISO it should work. However, you will not be able to use the remaining space on the device as the space normally used for the partition table is occupied by the boot manager in the ISO. There is the possibility that your ISO may support "persistence" which would allow you to use free space on the device while booted from the device. This requires an ISO type that allows this (Ubuntu and variants do and Debian but no others that I am aware of) and also a USB creation program that supports this. In that case, you would specify space to be used for persistence when writing the ISO to the device.

One can if one wishes, create a bootable USB device using GRUB and then use GRUB to boot directly from an uninstalled ISO. I've done this in the past and managed to get 5 ISOs bootable from a single thumb drive. It requires a knowledge of grub and a bit of patience to set up, but it's really cool once you have it working.

[benny_fletch]

I've been thinking about trying Neon for a while, but you all have convinced me the time is now. Thanks for the post!

[GreyGeek]

Great!
Allow me to recommend that you use Btrfs instead of EXT4. Awesome filesystem!