I am a fan of KDE most of the time. It is elegant and polished. My first introduction to Linux left me decidedly a Gnome 2 kinda guy and I waltzed over to KDE since I didn’t like either Unity or Gnome 3. But sometimes I experience bugs in KDE and for that reason, I’ve been running my laptop on Cinnamon. Yesterday, I decided to convert my desktop to Cinnamon, without reloading. But let me first waffle on about the bugs…
So, the two bugs in KDE that have been particularly oining; firstly, there’s something weird in X11 or Nvidia drivers that I can’t always double-click a desktop icon. I suspected it was Nvidia because when I had two monitors, with one on Intel and other on Nvidia, it would only be a bug on the screen connected to Nvidia. After getting a DVI to VGA adapter to connect both screens to Nvidia (allowing me to entirely disable Intel graphics), I wondered if the bug would demonstrate on both screens; instead it went away. Until one day the bug came back! That was around the same time I installed gamemode package to tune the system for gaming. I think it is brilliant, by the way, that a few of the big name games are coming out on Linux, like the last three games in both the Hitman and Tomb Raider series.
The second bug that oins me about KDE is how the file manager (dolphin) handles file transfers via the WEBDAV protocol. The file transfer progress bar is completely off. For example, suppose you have four files, of equal size, and you copy them to your webdav server. It’ll race up to 25% in a matter of seconds (faster than the network connection on my WEBDAV server), and then pause for ages, and then race up to 50%, 75% and 100%, pausing at each stage. I think it is showing me how fast it loads the file to RAM, not how fast it moves along the network. Very oining. Cinnamon shows you actual network file transfer rates, moving smoothly from nought to one hundred percent.
So, I decided, bye bye KDE, hello Cinnamon. Thing is, if I’m removing KDE, then I’m removing its display manager. If you don’t know, a display manager handles your log-in, among other things. KDE’s default display manager is SDDM and Cinnamon is quite happy with either LightDM and GDM3 or others. So the plan was, install cinnamon with LightDM and remove KDE and SDDM. First couple of commands were something like:
sudo apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment lightdm sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
Rebooted OK, logged in to system with LightDM and Cinnamon, logged out, switched to tty2 so I was working in pure commandline environment and typed sudo apt remove kded5 lightdm and hit enter. It suggested I had a lot of packages I didn’t need anymore so I ran sudo apt autoremove.
Hang on.
Did I just remove LightDM? That should have been SDDM. And I don’t think SDDM works without KDE being present. Now what? Without a desktop, I have many tools missing, so I can’t get a network connection easily, can I? How can I apt?
Oh.
expletive.
So I tried using netplan, the command-line way configuring the network but that was unsuccessful since netplan works with Ubuntu Server not Ubuntu Desktop. I may have eventually got it online, but I was struggling. So, how do I get a package installed on a PC without network? The answer is, install something called apt-offline. That was a bit of an arse.
Using my laptop and Ubuntu’s online index of their full software repository, I downloaded apt-offline on to a pendrive, plugged that into my offline desktop, mounted the pendrive since I have no GUI to do it automatically for me and typed the command sudo apt install /media/pendrive/apt-offline.version-blahblahblah and was told two dependencies missing. So I unmounted the pendrive, got back on my laptop and got the dependencies and installed them. I had to go back again, installing five packages in total before I got apt-offline working . I suppose I could have done the same to reinstall LightDM but i suspect waaaaaaaaaaaay more dependencies to fix. So, apt-offline it is. How do I use it?
Running the command man apt-offline, I read the manual but stumbled over it a bit. In summary, by using sudo apt-offline set, you save a list of your desired package or packages, and the current state of your offline system into a single signature file. Transfer that file to an online computer, then run sudo apt-offline get to download all the files necessary to install your new packages, dependencies and updates. Back to your offline computer and sudo apt-offline install pulls all files from your source, but crucially, stores them in a cache and does not actually install anything. To do that, do your normal command, in my case sudo apt install lightdm .
And my system was repaired, with Cinnamon instead of KDE. I learnt something new, but I would prefer to have my Sunday afternoon back!