LInux - pah humbug.

[Jethro_uk]

Which Mint ? Cinnamon, XFCE, GNOME ....

[Tim Streater]

<OK fires up Mint VM>

It's in a folder sitting on the Desktop, along with two folders containing its libs and other resources. If I right-click it, I can choose "Pin". So I do that and that option changes to "Unpin". But pinned or not, the icon doesn't stick in the taskbar - vanishes when I quit it.

This is only a small utility program that receives the download of any program I'm compiling in the Xojo IDE on my Mac, so I can remote debug Linux/Win/Pi versions, which is quite handy.

[Tim Streater]

Cinnamon. And there's something else. Where do I look for that info? The equivalent of "About this Mac" on the Apple Menu?

[Theo]

By analogy, i3/i5/i7 are like the BMW 3/5/7 series. They're the broad market positioning.

The next number (zero/one/two digits) is the generation, eg: i7-960 (first gen), i7-8700 (8th gen), i7-12700 (12th gen) by comparison like the BMW E36, E46 or whatever. There's quite a big difference from one generation to the next (like comparing a 1980 BMW to a

2020 BMW)

The remaining three digits are the model within the range, like BMW 316,

325, etc. They don't really mean anything except 'bigger is better'.

The letter on the end is the power class (eg U=15W ultrabook, H=45W workstation laptop, nothing=desktop, K=performance desktop) and sometimes extra features (Q=pro graphics, F=no graphics). Power makes the biggest difference in performance, so models from different power classes have very different performances.

I use cpubenchmark as a rough comparison for models from different power classes/generations.

That's Skylake (6th gen), which is fairly decent. There hasn't been a huge amount of improvement of late, although recently they're started gaining extra cores which helps with compute-heavy tasks that can use them.

If you're buying used, it's just about what fits in your budget. You might find an older more powerful machine is better than a newer low-end one in the same price bracket. Although I recently snagged an i5-8250U laptop for £100, which was good value if no workstation.

For power consumption, things were bad before Haswell (4th gen). What flavour is your i5? I have a server (running the Xeon version of a Haswell i7) which clocks in at 40W idle, including the chunky server power supply.

And idling laptop can clock in about 10W, but it depends what's plugged into it. Peripherals like hard drives can bump the power consumption up.

Also, you'd probably find your desktop monitor takes a lot more power when active than a laptop screen does.

Theo

[Paul]

Plug the details into Google and see what is available.

The dconf editor is used in that example, when the preference style controls aren't enough.

One thing people have played with in the past, was the width of scroll bars.

Even in Windows, you can't change everything. The Theme is pretty locked down, and that's to avoid excessive support issues caused by too much freedom.

Paul

[Tim Streater]

There is no trivial way to achieve this trivial task?

[Richard]

Did this not work? Right-click > Add to panel

or you've probably kf'd me so didn't see my post.

[Jeff Layman]

Type "sys" in the Menu search box. The Menu will provide several options which start with "sys", of which "System info" is at the top. Right click on it.

[Tim Streater]

Thanks for that. 20.1 Cinnamon.

[Jeff Layman]

I'll "reply" in case he has kf'd you.

What you stated works from the menu, but not if the "application" is on the desktop. If you right-click an item in the menu, there is an "add to panel" option. If you choose instead "add to desktop", the item will be added to the desktop. If you then right-click on that item, there is no "add to panel" option. I just wondered if that is what Tim was trying to do.

[Jeff Layman]

YW. I should have just said "left click" if you want to use it only once. I got a bit confused with your other request to add something to the panel (taskbar)!

[Jethro_uk]

It's probably around this point "the community" stops engaging with you :)

echo $DESKTOP_SESSION

will tell you.

Android is just as f***ed. Not only is there no definitive version, every manufacturer adds their own layer of obfuscation.

[Jethro_uk]

Without re-reading it, I'm guessing it's an equivalence to Windows "pin to taskbar" option on any shortcut no matter where it's displayed. So you can do it from the menu, desktop or -rather intuitively - from the taskbar itself once the program is open and showing in the taskbar.

This is where you discover every Linux desktop suite has it's own way of doing stuff.

[Tim Streater]

Well the app in question is in a folder that is on the Desktop. I just want to have it permanently in the Taskbar, that's all. Until I want to remove it, of course.

Just for context, this is Mint 20.1 running in a VirtualBox VM on my mac Mini running Mojave. I have also a W10 and W7 VMs that I run from time to time, for testing variously the Linux and Windows versions of an app I develop on the Mini using the Xojo IDE. Xojo provides remote debugging so I can launch and test the app from the Mini while it runs in a VM. The small app I'm trying to pin to the taskbar is Xojo's stub that interfaces from the app being debugged under as it might be Linux, back the the IDE running on the mac.

[Jethro_uk]

If you just want to email/surf and even run some media - then it's a good choice.

But just be aware the moment you step outside those operations, you are on your own.

My advice is to ensure you have a dual-boot machine with a valid version of windows available. Because it eliminates the "it's your setup" excuse which is the stock response of penguinistas when faced with issues.

It's well over a decade since I was impressed to hell over Linux (Ubuntu). As you will get used to and upgrade (Dappy to Edgy) broke something. In this case my sound card. My kernel-coding brother SSHd in behind my back and *while I was working* recompiled and installed the driver. First I knew of it was when the speakers burst into life.

I then imagine how impossible that would be in Windows and was impressed.

To be fair, SSH is a killer tool in the Linux box.

[Andrew]

By using something called 'System Commander'

[Jethro_uk]

GRUB is pretty good these days.

[Bob Eager]

I said it was!

[Jethro_uk]

This was back in 2007 or 8 ...

[AJH]

lscpu says

Architecture: x86_64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 4 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 4 Socket(s): 1 NUMA node(s): 1 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel CPU family: 6 Model: 60 Stepping: 3 CPU MHz: 800.000 BogoMIPS: 6385.65 Virtualisation: VT-x L1d cache: 32K L1i cache: 32K L2 cache: 256K L3 cache: 6144K NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3