A Funny Thing Happened

WetGeek

My wife and I are enjoying watching Harry Potter using the Haruna media player on my media machine. I must say I'm impressed. It's very thoughtfully designed, works well, and is pleasant to use.

So, while the movie is on, I looked for Haruna on my laptop, to familiarize myself with its features, and a funny thing happened. It's not there. The only difference that occurs to me is that the media computer was set up using the newly published Plasma 4.4 ISO file, while my laptop came up through the ranks, and attained Solus 4.4 by way of upgrades.

Apparently that's a difference between the two methods of getting to 4.4. I wonder what other differences I might notice in time? I'm seriously considering doing a fresh install of Solus Plasma on my laptop, just so I know for sure that it's 100% pure 4.4.

I wonder ... will I find out that VMs behave better on the fresh installation? Will they not lock up everything if I take them to full-screen on Wayland? Will they resize correctly? Will I find other differences?

I've convinced myself. I'll hate creating all those Thunderbird inbox rules again, but I'm gonna do it, starting now. See all y'all on the other side!

brent

WetGeek I looked for Haruna on my laptop, to familiarize myself with its features, and a funny thing happened. It's not there. The only difference that occurs to me is that the media computer was set up using the newly published Plasma 4.4 ISO file, while my laptop came up through the ranks, and attained Solus 4.4 by way of upgrades.

Harvey Certain changes to default applications do not carry over for existing installs. There is not much benefit of reinstalling, just install the app.

Interesting. So the 4.4 changes, or comes with, different default apps as the 4.3. For the Budgie all I know is Nemo is new and some Zram dealio. For Plasma, the media player.
So a 4.3 default like Celluloid could be changed to a new 4.4 (VLC for instance) and I'd never even know since the 4.3 app is in my Plank?

If that's all true, then I really don't want to know. I actually enjoy the surprises.

WetGeek

WetGeek I wonder ... will I find out that VMs behave better on the fresh installation?

The answer is "yes," but not entirely. With everything installed and configured, I decided to take a few minutes and create one VM - Solus 4.4 Budgie. When I took that VM to full-screen on my Wayland session, it indeed locked up the VM and its host. By now, that's happened to me enough times that I quickly extracted myself from the lockup.

But the real news is that my VMs now resize themselves as they should. No more creating scroll bars when the host window is smaller than the VM's display, and no more big black border when the host window is larger. As the host is resized, the VM resizes itself to match.

So, it's not perfect, but it's better. And I love it.

Harvey

Certain changes to default applications do not carry over for existing installs. There is not much benefit of reinstalling, just install the app.

Instead of recreating thunderbird rules I assume you could just backup ~/.thunderbird

WetGeek

Too late, @harvey, this is already the other side. Before I reinstalled, I compared my laptop to my Plasma VM, and found that it (quite naturally) more closely matched my media machine, not my laptop. It's going to take me a while to configure everything else, but I'm feeling better already.

Note that I'm not suggesting that everyone should choose this route. Listen to Harvey. I may be OCD about this, but I'm enjoying myself. Besides, I'm retired, and have plenty of time on my hands.

Harvey

Changes to default applications are usually not forced. Older Plasma installs had smplayer as the default video player. I think some really old ones may have even used vlc. Our current default for this on Plasma is haruna, if your install doesn't have it and you wish to use it simply install it.

Budgie switching from nautilus to nemo was not forced on existing installs. No old installs are forced to have zram-generator-defaults installed etc.

Main point is there is no need to reinstall the entire OS due to new defaults. But if you enjoy that sort of thing go for it. Personally I hate reinstalling and just want to make it clear no one has to do that to adopt new defaults. New release blogposts generally state default changes but its of course possible something is left out of the post unintentionally.

WetGeek

Harvey Personally I hate reinstalling and just want to make it clear no one has to do that to adopt new defaults

I'm not disputing that at all, and I respect your choice. But I've already reinstalled Solus, software installed and configured, /etc/fstab modified, symlinks created connecting my NAS shares to Dolphin, Vivaldi sync'd, Thunderbird configured with three email accounts, two calendars, and a feed for comics, plus three solitaire games installed and configured, VirtualBox installed and a VM created. All in a little less than two hours.

I've found that some serious problems I had with VMs no longer exist. I'm about ready to retire for the night, but my laptop is about 98% of what it was before I reinstalled Solus. The other 2% won't take long tomorrow.

I've installed Solus on 7 computers here, and most of them more than once, plus countless VM instances. I really don't hate doing it, because I can do it quickly, and for me the results more than justify the time it takes. We're all different. That's just me.

brent

Harvey I'm content from 4.3 to 4.4. thanks for the explanation.

Harvey

WetGeek

That is perfectly fine. I was not replying to anyone specifically, it was for anyone who is reading along and may have gotten the impression reinstalling was required. There is always another way.

penny-farthing

Harvey
To extend your point Harvey, isn't the Solus motto "Install today. Updates forever."?

WetGeek

Yeah, I'm back. I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn't. Too excited, I guess. So I'll just stay up tonight and put some final polish on my new system. Maybe create the other three Solus VMs.

I found one other difference when I hibernated this machine. Before, the screen used to go black when I told it to hibernate, then after a few seconds the original screen and all its contents would appear again, and finally it would go black again, and the machine would turn off. Now, when I tell it to hibernate, the screen goes black, and a few seconds later the machine turns off.

Maybe I've gotten rid of some of the cruft that @tomscharbach was talking about?

WetGeek

I've got all four VMs created, but still in OOTB condition. I'm getting a bit tired, so I'm gonna try to get a couple hours sleep now. The VMs can all hibernate, and all but MATE can resize smoothly as the host window resizes. Now that I think about it, that was just another thing I didn't like about MATE. I'll be glad to see Xfce.

Another thing to be happy about -- since 4.4 appeared, or maybe since flarum was updated, I'm now able to use Spectacle to capture the full screen and paste it, as above. No more need to send it to somewhere in "the cloud" and paste it back into the forum, or use Gwenview to resize it smaller. That makes life just a little bit easier.