For the last few days I had my laptop connected to an external monitor which has a 2560×1600 resolution. Whilst having a few websites open and doing a video chat the laptop completely ground to a halt with the fan going full speed.
My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X260 with an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, so not really a lightweight which was why this was so unexpected. After trying some random things I have solved this. So I thought I would detail it here if only so I remember in the future.
After my previous post on testing KDE Plasma on KDE Neon my friend and colleague Max commented with “Any thoughts on using Neon over Kubuntu”.
That did get me thinking as to whether or not Kubuntu with the backports PPA is as good and as stable to use as KDE Neon.
At the beginning of the year I gave KDE Plasma a try as the primary desktop on one of my devices. It wasn’t my primary laptop but I still used it heavily in that time. I enjoyed it but there were still some niggles that meant I wouldn’t have been happy with it being my primary desktop at the time.
A week ago I happened to come across the announcement for KDE Plasma 5.14. The thing that really caught my eye there was the “Display Configuration widget”. This led me to giving KDE & Plasma another chance, another week of testing. Again this is on my primary laptop, a highly-sepecced Lenovo ThinkPad X260.
TL;DR: Ubiquity UniFi gear is awesome!
When I moved into my current house one of the bigger technical challenges has been to get WiFi that works throughout my house reliably. Since we can only get regular phone lines here I’m on a VDSL2 internet connection which runs at 80/20mbit. The problem is this comes in via my office which is in the corner of the house. My kids bedrooms are in the opposite corner of the house so getting WiFi to reach that far becomes a technical challenge.
My go-to Linux distribution when I’m setting up my workstations is Fedora. I have been using it since Fedora Core 1 and RedHat 9 before that. I can’t even remember what RedHat version I started with now. I often try other distributions out and sometimes use them for a few months but I always end up jumping back to Fedora.
Fedora defaults to the Gnome desktop environment so I have used Gnome as my primary desktop environment for many years. Again I’ve tried others such as Cinnamon and XFCE but I always end up back in Gnome. In recent months I’ve heard a lot of good things about KDE Plasma so I thought I would give it a shot for a week. This is a report of my findings.
I have a friend who was hit by a workforce reduction at a company I used to work at (as was his entire department). He is a brilliant engineer who has worked on some massive projects. But is struggling to find somewhere new in-part due to the insane way the recruitment process works in our industry.
