As I was writing in my last post, I am working hard to reinstall both mediapc and serverpc from scratch. In both cases I was hoping to resolve hibernation problems. Both computers now have new Gigabyte GA-B250M-D3H boards in them so the outcomes should be identical.
However on resuming serverpc which has just been reinstalled with KDE over Debian 9.6 I have found that plasmashell is crashing at logon which means no user shell. plasmashell crashes are quite common and have a number of possible causes. If I want to spend some time trying to debug or reporting as a bug I could but so often many of these bugs are not resolved very rapidly, so not using hibernation is an obvious workaround.
So today I am reinstalling serverpc which will be much the same as it is before. As per usual, reusing my existing logon because of having /home on a separate disk volume, will save a lot of time and customisation but there is still a few hours of work reinstalling everything. When I remember I try to back up some of the system folders but of course I forgot to do it this time so I have a harder job. Actually on this blog I use the InstallMyPC tag for articles that give me steps to follow to reinstall the computers. Aaprt from those articles there are many other tasks that I am so proficient at that I don’t need to look up any documentation, such as installing Samba and sharing the network drives on each computer.
These days I am more proficient with Linux and see less issues on my computers which in turn means less time spent reinstalling them, I have also found Debian to be the best distro overall so I am spending less time installing different distros like when I was playing with different shells and Xubuntu and stuff. My first try with KDE was a disaster because I found it so hard to adapt to, so I went back to XFCE at that point. But having made the effort the second time with KDE now I am going to stick with it. One computer will keep XFCE but everything else will run KDE now.
serverpc has the flatpak version of Gimp as do other computers I have. I expect to also use the flatpak version of Qgis as it easier to install and because it is an experimental option for the Qgis community, and that means I won’t be running the development edition on serverpc now. Because I just need a reliable second option for the current version since mainpc started unexpectedly crashing just one particular project and I found serverpc with the same version of qgis was able to edit the project without any trouble. mediapc will however be installed with the development edition but I am not doing any serious work with the qgis development editions as it is too hard to run something that uses incompatible project files when it crashes and you have to use stable and it can’t read the project files from the development edition.