Hello Russell, On 3/29/18, Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
I've done a fresh install of Debian/Testing on a new laptop and the volume control buttons aren't working. They make no apparent difference to the volume and no change to the volume settings according to alsamixer.
It seems that the backend is "Phonon VLC". Is it possible to have KDE use ALSA directly without such things?
Check and double check. Someone else was asking a while back about the Linux audio stack, on another forum, and I was digging around. Go looking for Pulse Audio, I think, certainly whichever it was, it had Lennart Poettering all through it, and trouble cooperating with other layers.
Is there another desktop environment that has a more minimalist design without being like TWM? I want something that has notifications for USB devices, battery, network manager, etc but not too much else in the way of trying to take over everything and not having a process like plasmashell taking 10% of a CPU core when nothing is happening.
I understand, very much. I am not happy with where all of them have gone, and even more displeased with the assumptions behind all of them. Yes, there are background tasks that make life easier, but there are things that we can learn to do for ourselves, and have a better experience for doing so, it works "our" way. I know you have a preference for KDE styles, but it may be worth looking at "Mate" and "Cinnamon". Yes, time to install and look around, but a better idea of how they behave, and possibly better able to suggest which to choose for others. I tend to stick with the "traditional" style of Gnome, and I too will be looking around again in due course. The other aggravation is that both the major desktops tend to have "tied" applications that share a family of libraries, and mix and match applications can bring in both sets of libraries, and even multiple versions of each, swallowing much disk space. This is not to advocate for a totally minimalist way, too much like the closed Mac silo ecosystem, but a better considered approach. Try to think about what functionality is necessary, what is a nice add on, and where it can be made extensible as things change, that can lead the programmers to do a more stable base that can better change with the changing usage. Regards, Mark Trickett