More updates about my ThinkPad P52. KDE to Pop OS's custom Gnome.

Late this summer I bought the new Lenovo ThinkPad P52. This is a professional workstation class machine with top specs, including an Nvidia Quatro graphics card.

It has been a great machine. As expected, it has been super snappy and handles my 3D pipeline and video editing with relative ease... well mostly.

This is why I am writing this update. The laptop was more than doing the work but I started having trouble with skipping and stuttering on 4k footage again. Come to find out, it appeared that my beloved KDE desktop was using up an excessive amount of CPU. This hasn't been a problem in the past at all, so I'm guessing it came with a recent update.

I suspected that it would probably get ironed out in the next update or two, so I thought I might try LXDE for a while.

This is where I ran into some trouble and eventually ended up going a completely different route. I installed LXDE on my system and it botched my install. The problems showed as something gone awry in the screens and in effect would only work with multiple screens for some reason. That caused a day of mobile work that I couldn't do. Actually, I wasn't aware of the problem until I tried to use the computer in the field.

Whoopsie.

Nuke and pave time.

I have been using System76's Pop OS on this machine because it has the Nvidia software dialed in right "out of the box". It is a really neat distro, in my opinion. The first install I had on this machine included the additional KDE desktop that I put on afterward. It worked great - until it didn't.

Anyway, this time, I'm not going to add any additional desktops on top of the Pop OS's official and custom Gnome that comes with it. This custom version from System76 is meant to be a minimal environment that gets out of the way while keeping everything available. I haven't given the Gnome desktop a chance before, but even just the first day so far, I think I really like it. I haven't found myself fussing with it as I do with KDE all the time. I just do the work.

I'll keep you posted as I go, but I really think this is a good improvement.