Lighter still

19 April – ?? May 2026

The end of Windows for me

The evening of 15 November 2018. For many months on end, Windows 10 tries to force its ‘Spring Creators Update’ upon me. But it never succeeds: after about 15 minutes (perhaps shorter, but it feels like at least 15 minutes) the update ends at 30% completed, in an unhandled exception, the nature of which has never become clear. In another wasted quarter of an hour, in which the computer cannot be used, the changes are rolled back, so the Hewlett & Packard Pavilion laptop I’m using, bought on 2 July 2016, is back at a Windows 10 release dating from mid or end 2017.

That fatal evening it’s worse: the rollback also fails. There’s an endless loop of attempts to remedy the situation. Switching the computer off by holding the on-off switch depressed doesn’t help: after that it just starts over.

So I switch to a backup computer, a Packard Bell bought 2 April 2015. It has Windows 8 on it, which doesn’t get that annoying update.

I kept using that older computer until 26 July 2019. Another disastrous incident: I let the laptop slip off my lap, causing it to hit the floor hard on one corner. The system offered a diagnosis and reverting it to an earlier Windows version, but that never succeeded.

At that point I made a decision: to finally say goodbye to MSDOS and MS Windows, OSes I had never liked but had been using since 1990, when I switched to a different employer after five years with Nixdorf Computer, where in 1985 I had got to know Unix. Despite those almost 30 years of missing UNIX, I was still familiar with it, because I as using several implementations of Unix’s userland utitilities for MSDOS and Windows, most recently CygWin, and my website was running on VPSes, first under OpenBSD and soon after always under FreeBSD.

Quest

The first Linux I tried was Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia. I immediately liked it. Where Windows 8 and 10 offered me lots of things I will never need, and hid what I do need ever deeper within the system, like a command line, a text editor and a browser, Linux Mint has a start button in the lower left corner of the screen, and the menu it invokes is full of useful preinstalled programs.

On 7 and 8 september 2023 I noticed that every time I used Youtube under Linux Mint, meanwhile probably version 20.1 Ulyssa, the fan soon became loud. Program top revealed that desktop environment process cinnamon was using up about 230% of processor capacity. Three types of Firefox processes were using around 45% each, so almost all four processor cores (two physical cores, capable of running 4 threads) were in constant use. Then it soon gets hot.

I read that Xfce was more efficient, and an experiment on the unused ex-Windows HP Pavilion confirmed that. The look & feel remained largely the same, so I might switch to it, to Linux Mint Xfce.

However, the problem with Cinnamon was gone after an automatic kernel update. That was in kernel 5.15.0-83-generic. Temporarily returning to 82 or 79 did not make it come back. But while logging out and in again, a landscape-like symbol appeared (perhaps misinterpreted by me; I’m bad with icons) by which I could switch between the efficient and the inefficient version. The cause was ‘software rendering’, i.e. not using the graphical co-processor, so the normal processor cores, which are not very well suited for it, had to do that work.

Detection:
inxi -Fxz | grep -i -B1 render
If it says:
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel UHD Graphics (CML GT2)
the special hardware is used, and CPU usage is low. But with:
OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 15.0.7 256 bits)
a software emulation for the general processor cores is used, which is much slower and inefficient.

Desktop menu links

Nevertheless, my quest for more efficient desktop environments had already started, unstoppably.

I had never liked, or never understood, the object-oriented desktop paradigma that was popularised in the 1990s. Before they used computers, people were supposed to have rather chaotic piles of documents and folders lying before them on their desk, then pick one up to work on it. Then when computers were introduced, the chaos should move from desktop to screen, where workers clicked or double-clicked on a document, and the OS opened it in the associated program (assumed related one-to-one).

Is that really a pleasant or effective way to work? Not for me. I still think in terms of programs (not apps!) from which (or with which, in the CLI (command line interface)) you open files. Files that may represent documents, or something else.

Anyway, to each their own, but I always used the desktop as a menu system. That worked in Windows, and it worked in Linux Mint. No documents, but launchers on the desktop, or rather, in subfolders, and sometimes subfolders in those, to keep things organised.

There the problems began with Linux Mint Xfce.

jgmenu

@? Not finished yet. @?

Fluxbox

@? Not finished yet. @?