House and Household

I'd tried Deepin from my Cinnamon Manjaro install and liked it . Knowing I had to really do a clean Manjaro Deepin install to get the best of the system I thought I'd try pure Deepin OS first. Install process was flawless but somewhat different, maybe more bling? Maybe the Chinese characters at places. Maybe the different aesthetic? Worked well. Inital update went well but I did put in my standard packages. Gimp, Insync, Dropbox, Zotero, Wine (to run Scrivener), Xmind, Simplemind, Notecasepro, Softmaker Office, - Solaar. Tusk, All worked well. But the CPU was running at 60% where as doing the same on Manjaro it was running at 22%. (now) Store was great and integration with Flatpac was good. It reminded me of MacOs. Like it but not love. Bit too slick. Iwill use it to introduce others to linux but it was not quite for me. But Manjaro Deepin. Nice interface. Still has issues with freezes so it was back to XFCE with a MX linux style theme. MX Linux is interesting

Several months later; Seems strange to me that several months later the system is still running well and allowing me to work using several "non linux" tools for writing and visualisation. My main dramas have been getting my printer to integrate well. A Brother HL-3045cn one would think it would not be a problem. Doesn't want to play with Manjaro no matter what I do to persuade it. As Ubuntu settled into 18.04 I migrated to Mint Linux and a Cinnamon desktop. Wine is still running Scrivener (3 beta) (very well), Aeon1 (OK for my needs), Simplemind (well) and Xmind8 (I also run 7.5). Insync and Dropbox are boringly effective at syncing my various accounts. It all just seems to work. Timeshift a backup tool for Mint works well so far. HP360  Being a distro hopper AI had to try other desktops, after running it with Xubuntu I remigrated to Manjaro LXDE and LXqt. Works well so light none of the drag of Gnome or Plasma. Mint Cinnamon also works well -01-2019

Drive to Melbourne Be boring if I just said - well it was a 700km drive so what! But it was.   Bugger Mileages were ineresting; At holbrook it was getting    11.8 l/100km (what a shit measurment) Launceston        10.57 l/100km sat on 100 to 110 prefered 103kmp                                         Ferry  I'm boring and love the ferry. Sleep and food is great. We were on level 1 with the 144 as my wife (the owner) requested. First on last off and no caravans to booggy with. Performance  Faultless I cant see why people buy new cars. Sorry wait till electic is worth having. Till then a decent 1970's car will do.  

#deletefacebook Last night I followed Musks lead and deleted my facebook account. Second time. First time was because I had been the coordinator of an international group and I had several hundred "friends" who I only knew thru the group. This time its for a lot of reasons but was triggered by the Cambridge Analytical scandal. Reasons; I wasn't reading any more. Just sucking up the feed each day. "The Guardian" and "the conversation" were sources to repost. I got a buzz from "likes". It took time from my day. It was insidious and reinforced my own opinions. It was polarising.  The quality of my communication diminished. What will I miss? Easy communication.  Communication with old friends for whom I have no emails. Information sources and selling opportunities. What will I have to do to achieve the same level of communication is use email more and also a range of apps - sites - Linkedin - Gumtree - Skype G+ and so on.

Well I finally got sick of my mac not living up to its potential. Yes its 5 years old but its still a nice piece of gear. 32 g of memory an 5i processor and a slow hard drive. I was running drop box - 120Gb two google drive  accounts 100gb each. Zotero a bibliographic data base. Scrivener 3 - Gimp photo editing. iThoughts and Xmind for mind maps. Shotwell on parallels. Mail and web browsers (Firefox). Music thru itunes. It took 10 minutes to wind up. Then it would grind away and low and behold if you wanted it to compile something or save it. I realised my HP360 was running the same programs (functions) under Manjaro Mate so I tried that route with the imac. Manjaro and netrunner were tried. Both were OK but lacked zest. Manjaro Cinnamon worked well. So then I tried Mint Cinnamon 18.3. And yes everything work with a bit of zest. Scrivener 3 (beta) is running fine in wine. Xmind works. and the rest all work in Linux. And it does not run like a dead slug. Copyi

Installed several distros on this duo core machine and it dies with most when Dropbox and Insync start up. With Ubuntu and most gnome desktops its slow. So I put  Manjaro XFCE Edition (17.1.4) on after trying Netrunner rolling. Strangely  the Plasma desktop did not suck resources but is not to my liking.  So I installed the XCFE version then added Mate and Cinnamon.  I like both but in my situation Cinnamon is the best as the indicators for Dropbox and Insync both work "out of the box". As ever I also added Scrivener 2.9 running under wine. No issues. Zotero_standalone. Vivaldi - Browser of choice. Not a resource hog. So far so good.  Also found a great Ever-note client for Linux in Tusk https://klauscfhq.github.io/tusk/