I just use KDE problem solved. 
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Sorry, but I really dislike KDE: some of their decisions about how the desktop should function are contrary to what I want.
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Has anyone had problems with Audacity during this time? It sorta kinda worked for me but when I logged out and logged with Mate it worked just fine.
Well, duh ā installed and am now using Mate. (Why did I type Gnome??? 
) Checked Cinnamon after the recent update to systemd, but still not working. Bunch of things Iām wishing Mate had which Cinnamon has had for some time (and still havenāt found anything in Mate which I wish Cinnamon would add). Finding some really weird stuff with this DE and right now and would return to Cinnamon in a heartbeat. But at least it is working.
Well, Mate is Gnome 2, so technicallyā¦ 
You pretty much downgraded your DE.
Itās like when I stopped using KDE+Dolphin for close to a year and switched to Cinnamon+Nemo because I thought that I needed to have KDE to use Dolphin. Ended up finding out I could use Dolphin inside Cinnamon without installing a DE I wouldnāt be using.
Or like yesterday, when I decided to test Index, PCManFM, Thunar, Nautilus, and Pantheon Files to see if they had enough features to compete with a simplified Dolphin or beefed up Cinnamon.
Long story short: THEY SUCK SO BAD. They are missing so many very basic things.
Yeah, but at least I have something which works!
To be fair, I think they all do the basic things. (Well, I guess i3 doesnāt! 
) The differences are in some basic philosophies and how much/easily they can be customised to personal tastes.
When I taught computer classes, I was often asked what was the ābestā computer. My standard reply was āWhat is the best car?ā ā different people have different needs and different tastes. If there is a clear #1 best of a product, the other brands are headed towards extinction; as long as a product better meets the needs of a sufficient number of users/customers to survive, it probably will. So even though I personally dislike KDE, I recognise it meets the needs of some users better than other DEs, including (if Iām reading you correctly) yourself.
ddnn, you seem to be very interested in file managers. Can you recommend a good comparison of file managers with pros and cons?
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I was specifically talking about file managers other than Dolphin and Nemo here.
Agreed.
And correct.
TL;DR: There may be many typos. Was typing this in between calculating GCT and testing a game. But the main thing is that Nemo has the right balance for most, and if you want more than what Nemo can do, use Dolphin instead.
I havenāt used Cosmicās file manager yet, but Iāve tested most of the others.
Thunar, Index, Pantheon Files, PCManFM, and Caja, can meet the needs of most regular people. However, if you use your file manager to organise many files at once, especially regularly, they all fall short in small to large ways.
Thunarās one saving grace is that it can be extended, but unless you know how to write scripts or someone has already created a script with a feature you need, this means absolutely nothing. The others I mentioned are just basic, and nothing more.
Nautilusā¦ Gnome has shoved that thing into the deepest landfill they could find. It is so basic now that even regular users may have issues with it. Obviously they donāt because many of them use Gnome as-is.
Nemo. What Nautilus could have been, and what both Pantheon Files and Caja should aim for, in my opinion. Like Dolphin, it can be as simple as a regular file manager, but if you go into the settings, there are some features that neither of Nautilusās other children have, nor Nautilus itself for that matter.
Dolphin ā the best file manager known to man. Nuff said.
PS: Iāve also tested Double Commander, Gnome Commander, Krusader, and Konqueror (which is primarily a web browser). Krusader came the closest to rivalling Dolphin and Nemo, but the forced twin panel is why I donāt use it.
PS #2: This is kinda off-topic, so we could talk about it in another topic instead, if you need more info/details.
Ah. Even though Cinnamon is not currently working for me, Nemo does. I have left Caja as the default file manager (leery of changing default file managers in any DE), but have Nemo as a quick keyboard shortcut (prefer keyboard to mouse where possible) and am using it instead of Caja.
Thanks for info on file managers!
Youāre welcome.
No need to worry about changing the default file manager unless you are using KDE or Gnome. They are the only two that hate when you use anything but the default.
When you do it, they are like, āThe audacity! How dare you?!ā
2 Likes
@ddnn believes Dolphin is the best choice for a non-KDE machine and you will have to find outāit just might be perfect for many, he is right.
I had the opposite experience as Iāve bricked Budgie twice trying Dolphin over the years. The Baloo indexer never adapted to the gnome base and indexing would take almost 99% of memory and paralyzed me twice. Bricking it once.
In fact this has caused me to never install K-Anything in a non-KDE environment. Although I am probably missing out on some groovy software, I can live with it my decision.
Nemo and Cinnamon are a perfect pair imho. you have to download the additional file-roller and pic-resizer extensions. Caja just OK. and PCManFM is my least favorite (lack of features).
2 cents
This is a pebkac moment. Why enable Baloo on a non-KDE system? 
I didnāt even know that was possible. I use FSearch. Yes, not intuitive, but it works.
For me, the issues I have due to installing Dolphin on a GTK system only affect Dolphin.
In my current case, itās dark themes not working for Dolphin. And I know itās a Dolphin issue because I also have Kate/Kwrite, qBittorrent, Copyq, Flameshot, VLC, etc. All Qt apps, and dark themes work just fine.
was dragged in with the package, not seperate, at the time
Itās still not separate. So, again, why enable it? 
Literally, the two first dependencies. Itās alphabetical, of course, but still.
Dolphin: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/dolphin/
So, either you enabled it via terminal or you also had KDE installed, which again, pebkac.
I didnāt know I could un-enable it. I will confess this was by noob-era 
I donāt remember disabling it, so if I didnāt, and it doesnāt runā¦ pebkac.
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Given that my Cinnamon DE is still not working (and Iām getting frustrated with Mate!), Iāve decided to either remove Cinnamon and then reinstall it or just do a reinstall?
Recommendations as to which is better?
Any good instructions?
Create a new user account and enable all the same settings.
If things are good, then something in your currentās user settings is not compatible with the update. So you may need to start from scratch by uninstalling all applets, extensions, or desklets, and removing then re-adding your panel. Or you could try this first.
If things end up in the same state even with a new user, I doubt reinstalling will fix it.
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Just to recap: you did the update around Nov 27?
So itās most likely you got a partial update of Cinnamon, what casually got mentioned in this thread on github.
So I concluded that my previous attempts to fix the DE were moot and reverted the updated packages to the version before this mishap and just waited.
On Dec 2nd I gave it another try (I had some indicators that it was worth it) and indeed all problems are gone.
I do not have a multi-monitor setup like you do, so what did you actually try so far, besides switching to Mate?
Browsing the thread didnāt give me this info.
To put this thread back on track, hereās a copy of the relevant portion of pacman.log to show what this mishap looked like:
[2024-11-27T00:55:16+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-menus (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T00:55:16+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-desktop (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T00:55:17+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-control-center (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T00:55:17+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-screensaver (6.2.1-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T00:55:17+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-translations (6.2.2-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T00:55:17+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cjs (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T00:55:50+0100] [ALPM] upgraded muffin (6.2.0-2 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-11-27T17:15:09+0100] [ALPM] downgraded cinnamon-desktop (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.0-1)
[2024-11-27T17:15:10+0100] [ALPM] downgraded muffin (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.0-2)
[2024-11-27T17:15:10+0100] [ALPM] downgraded cjs (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.0-1)
[2024-11-27T17:15:10+0100] [ALPM] downgraded cinnamon-translations (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.2-1)
[2024-11-27T17:15:10+0100] [ALPM] downgraded cinnamon-screensaver (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.1-1)
[2024-11-27T17:15:10+0100] [ALPM] downgraded cinnamon-menus (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.0-1)
[2024-11-27T17:15:10+0100] [ALPM] downgraded cinnamon-control-center (6.4.0-1 -> 6.2.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:32+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-desktop (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:32+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-settings-daemon (6.2.0-2 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:32+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-menus (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:32+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-control-center (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:32+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-screensaver (6.2.1-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:32+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-session (6.2.1-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:33+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cjs (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:33+0100] [ALPM] upgraded muffin (6.2.0-2 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:34+0100] [ALPM] upgraded nemo (6.2.8-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:35+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon (6.2.9-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:35+0100] [ALPM] upgraded cinnamon-translations (6.2.2-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:38+0100] [ALPM] upgraded nemo-fileroller (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:38+0100] [ALPM] upgraded nemo-image-converter (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:39+0100] [ALPM] upgraded nemo-preview (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
[2024-12-02T19:38:39+0100] [ALPM] upgraded nemo-share (6.2.0-1 -> 6.4.0-1)
In hindsight on my system the symptoms matched the problems.
Of course @ddnn has a point here by suspecting config files being messed up due to this version mix. Which apparently didnāt happen on my machine.
Yep ā usually update at least once a day.
I considered doing that, but last time I reverted to an earlier version of something there were some issues. I figured Iād just wait for later updates to repair the mess. Although I applied those updates, the problems did not resolve. That was when I switched to Mate.
(I have four 1920Ć1080 monitors, but the fourth is normally reserved for videos being watched with my spouse. My workflow relies on the multiple monitors.)