Having just spent another week going around in circles trying to get a stable Linux desktop, it is time that I decided just what my priorities should be. That a lot of the kit I have been using is probably too old to cope with the current setup has been a little obvious for some time, but I has been working happily despite the problems that 'upgrades' to tumbleweed have brought to the party. When first set up in the flat, a 2 channel VGA KVM switch provided access to the windows machine in parallel with the Linux box, and at that time it had no problem with 4k resolution, but would only handle wired mouse and keyboard. Over the weekend I took full advantage of the 'amazon prime trial' and for fairly modest money, I've replace the VGA switch with a 4 channel 4k HDMI one and all of the cables are now marked '4k' as well. This was augmented yesterday by a second 2 port switch which adds a second channel to the windows box. The wired mouse and keyboard have been replaced with wireless ones which have been sitting around for some time and all of the cables under the desk have been tided and a number of 'unused' ones finally removed. The ONLY irritation is that the mains hum on the speaker system has returned and I know the fix to that may be to move cables away from the mains, but a new set of speakers with better bass would probably be a better start, and I don't really need the mixer that links in the windows audio either.

I say that everything is stable, but that is not quite accurate. What prompted the upgrade to the video distribution was a problem which originally seemed to be with the displayport output of the computer. It would go through bouts of going black and then coming back. Swapping over the 4k monitors, the problem seemed to stay with the displayport, although after replacing the cable to that with a 4k HDMI adapter and cable, the problem moved to the OTHER HDMI output ... It was that which then prompted the ripping out of the rest of the old cables and making sure everything was 4k rated. Which at first seemed to fix the problem, but then things started playing up again. The key here is that I'd been trying to stabilise the desktop by only using the new 'wayland' display service and drivers. Which has been documented already ( Application UI scaling and KDE desktop styling and usability problems ). A reset to the machine kicked me back onto X11 although I did not immediately realise that. The flashing monitor was no longer a problem but the layout was wrong. I went to fix that and then realised I'd been here before ... a quick check confirmed that yes we were back on X11. Log out and back in on wayland ... unstable monitor back. So for the last 24 hours I've been back with X11 and not a single flash. Only the aggro caused by switching to the windows computer when the Linux desktop moves everything around as the monitor is 'no longer connected'. Don't you just love progress!

Applying all of the notes I've gathered while messing around with the font sizes on the desktop I'm in a lot better place than I was a week ago. Was the agrro cause by creating a new user necessary, possibly not, but with the additional notes that have allowed me to port the extra stuff I actually use, it has been helpful and I would not rule out another new user at some point, but WHY can't I just hit reset and restore the desktop to a clean state hardware and software wise? I think that this perhaps has something to do with 'themes' and it may well be I need to spend time building my own, but that is not high on the todo list at the moment. The question is just what should I target next? I think I need to get back to the web services upgrade to PHP8.4 and get all of this infrastructure modernised ... but the PHP7.3 build is working fine, it's only a few bugs that perhaps I would be better simply fixing them in the old code. At least now I do have the VSCode stuff working and at a reasonable font size so I need to take stock on just what still needs doing on the new build before making a decision. I think that I probably have enough functionality in the new code to display all the websites as they are on the old platform and so it is time to start the switch. I should be able to run both in parallel anyway initially, perhaps with .uk on old code and .co.uk on the new. One thing I do need to get rid off is the crash that causes me to loose entries made to the blog pages as just happened. At least this time I HAD remembered to copy the new text before trying to save.