great jazz

Volunteer Andre Lacerda hosts "The House That Jazz Built" every Sunday from 11 pm to 1 am on KUNM radio here in New Mexico. As KUNM's website (https://www.kunm.org/) describes it:

The House That Jazz Built brings you Avant Garde, Contemporary and Experimental Jazz from the last 50 years with a focus on recent releases.  Includes interviews with local artists, recordings of live shows and current events.

Lacerda (see: https://www.kunm.org/people/andre-lacerda) also serves as substitute host for some other shows at KUNM, including the "All That Jazz" segment, which airs here Monday thru Friday from noon to 1:30 pm. He's been a regular this year on the Monday slot. For "All That Jazz", Lacerda steps back from the "experimental" stuff he plays on Sunday nights, and the result is an hour and a half of some of the finest jazz you'll hear anywhere.

kunm.org has the great "Two Week Archive" feature (I take advantage of it all the time!), for those who can't catch on-air broadcasts (or who want to replay them).

 

demographic shift

Check out Gary Younge's article, "Counted out: Trump's desperate fight to stop the minority vote", the latest piece in The long read section at The Guardian. Excerpt:

The trouble is that as white people become a minority in the US, efforts to disfranchise non-white voters necessarily become ever more crude and ever more desperate, but cannot be guaranteed to produce results. The sums just don’t add up. The group sought for exclusion is growing at a faster rate than can plausibly be excluded. Republicans have only won the popular vote once in the last eight presidential elections. This, in no small part, explains the bizarre moment we find ourselves in, with many Republicans refusing to admit what everyone else can plainly see – that they lost the election. They are howling at the moon because they are running out of options here on Earth.

they're sho nuff playin ruff

My song for the day: "So Ruff, So Tuff" by Roger - https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=s90dqNfPDR0&list=RDAMVMs90dqNfPDR0

 

we are one

My song for the day:

 

We Are One 

by Frankie Beverly and Maze

 

Can't understand
Why we treat each other in this way
Taking up time
With the silly silly games we play
We've got our love
And no matter how it's said or done

We are one no matter what we do
We are one love will see us through
We are one and that's the way it is

Sometimes I feel
That we try and make each other sad
The things we do
How we make each other feel so bad
We've got so much
We could all be having so much fun

We are one from the very start
We are one deep down in your heart
We are one
And that's the way it is

I can't understand
Why we treat each other in this way
Taking up time
With the silly silly games we play
We've got our love
And no matter how it's said or done

We are one no matter what we do
We are one love will see us through
We are one and that's the way it is

 

some reading material

Courtesy of The New Yorker, an exclusive excerpt from Barack Obama's soon-to-be-released presidential memoir, A Promised Land: "A President Looks Back on His Toughest Fight"

enlightenment

Listening to the Enlightenment album by McCoy Tyner, recorded in 1973 at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. Alphonse Mouzon on drums (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mouzon). More about the album here.

two from pragmatic

Found two nice articles from pragmaticlinux.com. First:

"Getting started with Double Commander" - https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/06/getting-started-with-double-commander/

This article, from back in June, offers some tips on using the dual-paned, "orthodox" Double Commander file manager. As the author writes:

Double Commander is a free and open source dual pane file manager. It is an excellent file manager, especially for those who prefer a consistent file manager experience, while trying out different Linux desktop environments. This article assists you with getting Double Commander installed and configured on your Linux system.

Each desktop environment ships with its own file manager: Nautilus on Gnome, Dolphin on KDE, Thunar on XFCE, etc. Working in the file manager forms and integral part of my daily PC work flow. Therefore I do not enjoy being forced to switch to a different file manager, each time I try out a different desktop environment on Linux. Additionally, I really enjoy dual pane file managers. If you recognize yourself in these file manager preferences, then I can highly recommend giving Double Commander a try.

Kinda sums up why I use "DC".

Second:

"Install a minimal KDE on Debian 10 'buster'" - https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/10/install-a-minimal-kde-on-debian-10-buster/

Good tips here. Basically, do a netinstall, choose only "standard system utilities", then run:

sudo apt -y install kde-plasma-desktop plasma-nm

After that, add whatever packages/apps desired.

sweet music

Listening to Iron Starlet, a very nice album by young jazz pianist Connie Han. Here's a link to it at YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywx6n3Qzo4&list=OLAK5uy_njjp_GoWQ7v0iRuvuhDeR57KcwYPSu4aE

More info: https://modernjazztoday.com/album/iron-starlet-connie-han/

 

asunder

Testing out the Asunder CD ripper and encoder. Project homepage: http://littlesvr.ca/asunder/

I installed Asunder in Debian Buster GNOME:

$ sudo apt install asunder

Optional dependencies include the lame and vorbis-tools packages, the latter of which was already installed here. I decided not to add lame.

I inserted a CD and started up Asunder. Asunder showed the found CDDB info.

For now, I left everything at the defaults. Asunder was set to encode to OGG Vorbis, which was exactly what I wanted.

I ripped the files and then opened them in the Audacious music player. Track information was picked up as expected, and the songs played perfectly.

I was planning to look at some other options for ripping CDs in GNOME. I took a quick look at ripperX, but then I tried Asunder and it seemed to give me what I wanted out-of-the-box. Good software, does what it's supposed to do. Sold.

 

getting filenames/pathnames

Here's a tip on how to quickly copy and paste the full path of a file from GNOME's Files (aka nautilus) onto the command line in Terminal (aka gnome-terminal): Drag And Drop Files And Folders In Terminal To Print Their Absolute Path

Not all terminal emulators will support this, but it also works with KDE Plasma's Konsole.

I found that this trick also works for copying the absolute pathname of a file from my preferred file manager, Double Commander, into gnome-terminal.

Double Commander offers a few other options for copying filenames. In this shot I've got the ~/scripts directory selected, and I can copy the filename to the clipboard via a menu entry (Mark > Copy Filename(s) with Full Path or Mark > Copy Filename(s) to Clipboard):

 

Even nicer, buttons for those actions can be placed on Double Commander's toolbar:

Very handy. From the clipboard, the filenames can be copied to the terminal emulator with the Ctrl+Shift+V keystroke.

The menu entries in Double Commander show keystroke hints for yet another way of doing this:

Ctrl+Shift+X - copy filename to clipboard
Ctrl+Shift+C - copy absolute pathname to clipboard

I've found it worth my time to practice those keystrokes a few times to get my fingers used to 'em. And, again, after copying:

Ctrl+Shift+V - paste from clipboard to terminal emulator

ugly, ignorant, and just plain sad

"The grocery manager, the anti-maskers, and the one thing he wouldn't say"

C'mon, people.

brilliant decision

Not everyone thinks that it's such a good idea to have organized football, at any level, during this particular time. USA Today's Christine Brennan penned a column that speaks for many of us: "Opinion: Big Ten's decision to play football signals darkest day in conference's sports history":

 An excerpt:

 [...]

Just as the Big Ten was looking smarter by the day as COVID-19 outbreaks popped up at Michigan State, Wisconsin and Maryland while other conferences playing football announced COVID-related postponements and soaring cases, the league’s presidents reversed themselves and decided to steer their schools and their football programs right into the teeth of what are predicted to be some of the worst days of the pandemic in October and November.

And how are they doing it? With a mountain of daily antigen tests, special delivery for Big Ten football teams only. Rapid tests for football players, but apparently not for the elderly in Ann Arbor or Columbus or Evanston, or for school children and teachers in Bloomington or New Brunswick or Minneapolis, or for students paying for their education amid the outbreaks in East Lansing or Madison or College Park.

So how will this work? Smooth as silk, I’m sure. Let’s look at Michigan State. The other day, all MSU students were asked to self-quarantine – and 30 large houses, including 23 fraternities and sororities, were ordered into mandatory quarantine – after the school announced 342 new coronavirus cases.

“This is an urgent situation,” Ingham County Health Officer Linda S. Vail said. “The exponential growth of COVID-19 cases must stop.”

So hey, Michigan State, let’s start football! What could go wrong?

[...]

Indeed.

i might keep this one

I wrote a little about Emmabuntüs back in June (post: "from france"). I ended up doing an installation, which took up a little over 8 GB on the hard drive. I used the 32-bit iso (emmabuntus-de3-i686-10.4-1.02.iso).

Emmabuntüs Debian Edition is basically Debian Stable underneath. I've purged a lot of packages, added a few of my favorites, tweaked some things, and turned off a bunch of things that were on by default. I'm finding my trimmed-down setup to be a pleasure to use. It certainly looks like a good option for older computers.

Emmabuntüs comes with Xfce and LXQt. LXQt can use other window managers besides Openbox; in this case, the window manager is Xfcwm4 (one way to show the current WM is with the wmctrl -m command). This is my first time using LXQt without having Openbox underneath; seems to be working out okay.

A few shots of my LXQt desktop:

 

And, a couple from the Xfce session:

 

Emmabuntüs seems to be an excellent project. I'd like some sort of minimal installation option. Can't find much else to complain about; one of the nicer distros I've seen.

 

looking more attractive

Visitors to the MX Linux website might be pleasantly surprised by some recent developments:

Yep, MX includes Fluxbox on their main isos along with the default Xfce, and now there's also a KDE iso! Kinda makes me a bit nostalgic for the old Mepis days, when I mainly used KDE.

For more info about available MX Linux downloads, see: https://mxlinux.org/download-links/

I took a look at MX's Fluxbox setup a few months back (https://monksblog-malspa.blogspot.com/2020/05/fluxbox-in-mx.html), but it seems that there's been a lot of work done on it since then. Check out the latest announcement about it, here.

I haven't look at the KDE spin yet. It might be a nice option for some users, if choices like KDE Neon, Kubuntu, and Debian w/ KDE Plasma aren't enough.

simply stable plus openbox

From https://head-on-a-stick.github.io/: "SharpBang (♯!) GNU/Linux is a live ISO image that can be used to install a pre-configured Openbox/Tint2 desktop running on Debian stable."

I decided to take a look, and downloaded sharpbang-buster-backports-10.5.0-amd64.hybrid.iso. When I booted into the live system, I found a clean, simple Openbox setup:

 

Some of the apps/packages included: Thunar, Gparted, Synaptic, Galculator, Mousepad, Firefox ESR, mpv Media Player, gmrun, htop, ranger, tint2, UXTerm, rsync, and obmenu. Here's a shot showing the nicely-arranged right-click menu:

 

The SharpBang project appears to provide just about everything I want/need in a live session, without including too much other stuff. I think the idea was for something along the lines of the old CrunchBang project. I took a look at the /etc/apt/sources.list file; no surprises there:

deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main contrib non-free

Great job here by "Head-on-a-Stick"!! Here's the github page: https://github.com/Head-on-a-Stick/Sharpbang

 

 

worth the wait?

BunsenLabs Lithium was finally released yesterday, over one year after the release of Debian 10 ("Buster"), which Lithium is derived from. The release announcement can be found here at the BunsenLabs forums.

I downloaded the 32-bit iso (651 MB) -- instead of the full, 64-bit iso (2.1 GB) -- wrote the image to a flash drive, and booted up. I wanted to check out the live session from the smaller image even though a note at the installation page at the BunsenLabs website says, "Using the 64-bit ISO is recommended, as the CD-sized ISO has been surgically reduced in size."

Post #3 in the forum thread mentioned above contains package lists for the full image as well as for the smaller image. Some of the apps/packages included as defaults on the CD-sized image: Dillo web browser (no Firefox), Thunar file manager, GParted, Ristretto image viewer, Evince document viewer, Mousepad text editor, URxvt terminal emulator, and mpv media player. BunsenLabs, of course, ships with Openbox as the default window manager instead including one of the standard desktop environments.

I felt that the CD-sized image would be great for doing a Lithium installation, but its live session was not quite what I would have liked it to be. I'm guessing that the live session from the 64-bit image is more polished. The CD image booted fine on 3 out of 4 of my laptops; I'll keep it on my flash drive as it looks like it could certainly be used for emergency purposes, and for just playing around.

The default Welcome window contains some important information to read before proceeding:

The BunsenLabs website: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

And, the BunsenLabs page at DistroWatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bunsenlabs

favorite bangs

Some of my favorite DuckDuckGo !bang codes:

!m - Google Maps
!w - Wikipedia
!s - StartPage
!lilo - lilo search
!ytm - YouTube Music
!yt - YouTube
!dpkg - Debian package search
!pac - Arch package search

!aur - Arch AUR package search

!up (or !apt) - Ubuntu package search

!wc - Weather Channel

!allmusic - AllMusic reviews and info

For more info on DuckDuckGo's bang shortcuts, see: https://start.duckduckgo.com/bang

from france

Fascinating distro. I downloaded the latest release of Emmabuntüs -- the download was about 3.3 GB -- and I've been running it in live sessions, from a flash drive. The Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 3 1.02 release announcement includes the following bit of information:

This distribution was originally designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers donated to humanitarian organizations, starting with the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution's name obviously comes from), to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware, thereby reducing the waste induced by the over-consumption of raw materials.

That sounds good to me. For more info, check out https://emmabuntus.org/.

The live session defaulted to an Xfce desktop, with an option to switch to LXQt. Here's a shot of the LXQt desktop, with the Welcome window:

Emmabuntüs ships loaded with applications, as noted in this Distrowatch review. I like that it's based on Debian Stable. I'll certainly be keeping it around for live sessions, although I don't think I'll be doing an installation. I think I'm better off with a system built from a Debian netinstall. Still, I'm impressed and intrigued by this distro, and I may end up changing my mind about installing it on one of my notebooks.

Here's Emmabuntüs DE3-1.02 with Xfce:

the jazzy one

I used to love listening to WJZZ in the Detroit area, on 105.9 FM. Old-timers might remember this, from the late 70s or early 80s: "The jazzy one -- oh five, point nine."

Check out my Father's Day gift from M.A.L.:

Sweet!

hope

Barack Obama, June 1, 2020:  "How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change"

As millions of people across the country take to the streets and raise their voices in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing problem of unequal justice, many people have reached out asking how we can sustain momentum to bring about real change.

Ultimately, it’s going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from past efforts that are worth remembering.

First, the waves of protests across the country represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States. The overwhelming majority of participants have been peaceful, courageous, responsible, and inspiring. They deserve our respect and support, not condemnation — something that police in cities like Camden and Flint have commendably understood.

On the other hand, the small minority of folks who’ve resorted to violence in various forms, whether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism, are putting innocent people at risk, compounding the destruction of neighborhoods that are often already short on services and investment and detracting from the larger cause. I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it. If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.

Second, I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice, and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices — and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.

Moreover, it’s important for us to understand which levels of government have the biggest impact on our criminal justice system and police practices. When we think about politics, a lot of us focus only on the presidency and the federal government. And yes, we should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it. But the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels.

It’s mayors and county executives that appoint most police chiefs and negotiate collective bargaining agreements with police unions. It’s district attorneys and state’s attorneys that decide whether or not to investigate and ultimately charge those involved in police misconduct. Those are all elected positions. In some places, police review boards with the power to monitor police conduct are elected as well. Unfortunately, voter turnout in these local races is usually pitifully low, especially among young people — which makes no sense given the direct impact these offices have on social justice issues, not to mention the fact that who wins and who loses those seats is often determined by just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, votes.

So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.

Finally, the more specific we can make demands for criminal justice and police reform, the harder it will be for elected officials to just offer lip service to the cause and then fall back into business as usual once protests have gone away. The content of that reform agenda will be different for various communities. A big city may need one set of reforms; a rural community may need another. Some agencies will require wholesale rehabilitation; others should make minor improvements. Every law enforcement agency should have clear policies, including an independent body that conducts investigations of alleged misconduct. Tailoring reforms for each community will require local activists and organizations to do their research and educate fellow citizens in their community on what strategies work best.

But as a starting point, here’s a report and toolkit developed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and based on the work of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that I formed when I was in the White House. And if you’re interested in taking concrete action, we’ve also created a dedicated site at the Obama Foundation to aggregate and direct you to useful resources and organizations who’ve been fighting the good fight at the local and national levels for years.

I recognize that these past few months have been hard and dispiriting — that the fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and hardship of a pandemic have been compounded by tragic reminders that prejudice and inequality still shape so much of American life. But watching the heightened activism of young people in recent weeks, of every race and every station, makes me hopeful. If, going forward, we can channel our justifiable anger into peaceful, sustained, and effective action, then this moment can be a real turning point in our nation’s long journey to live up to our highest ideals.

Let’s get to work.


Written by
Barack Obama
Dad, husband, President, citizen.

an excellent handbook

The latest edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook, now available (paperback, download, or online): https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/

Also see: https://debian-handbook.info/

fluxbox iconbar trick

Fluxbox has no way for changing the order of the list of windows on the iconbar. The most recently opened window always shows up last on the list. I like to have the windows organized by workspace; if I have one app running on Workspace 1 and something else running on Workspace 2, for example, I want the window on Workspace 1 to show up first on the iconbar, even if that app wasn't the first one started.

Someone came up with the script below. The idea is that it hides and redraws the active window, and moves the window to the end of the list on the iconbar. The script requires the xdotool package.

#!/bin/sh
# designed to be used with a keyboard shortcut
# in ~/.fluxbox/keys that could be:
# Control Shift Mod4 X :Exec /home/username/bin/move-to-end-of-taskbar.sh
xdotool getactivewindow windowunmap windowmap

This is not an ideal solution, but it does allow for rearranging the windows, so it isn't a bad workaround.

Source: https://bgstack15.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/rearrange-windows-on-iconbar-in-fluxbox/

Many thanks to "bgstack15" for putting this out there!

distraction-free fluxbox

I installed Fluxbox to use in Kubuntu 20.04. I wanted to keep things clean and simple. Besides the fluxbox package and its dependencies, I added numlockx and dmenu. I've got a trimmed down root menu, with entries for only a few apps:

No cute icons on this desktop. Here's Konsole showing my neofetch, with a couple of windows shaded, and dmenu in action along the top of the screen:

For KDE Plasma apps to look right in Fluxbox, I added the following line to the ~/.fluxbox/startup file:

export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=kde
 

A middle click on the desktop brings up the handy Workspaces menu:

I like the distraction-free feel of this setup. I'm not sure how long before I get tired of the plain background provided by the zimek_darkblue Style I've chosen, but it's nice for now. As usual, I relied heavily on man fluxbox, my saved config files from previous Fluxbox setups, and my notes. Here's the contents of my ~/.fluxbox/menu file, for those might want to make use of it:

# Revised fluxbox menu

[begin] (fluxbox)

   [exec] (firefox) {firefox}
   [exec] (konsole) {konsole}
   [exec] (double commander) {doublecmd}
   [exec] (dmenu [mod4+space]) {dmenu_run}

   [submenu] (fluxbox) {}
      [config] (Config)
      [workspaces] (Workspaces)
      [submenu] (styles)
         [stylesdir] (/usr/share/fluxbox/styles)
         [stylesdir] (~/.fluxbox/styles)
      [end]         
      [reconfig] (reconfigure)
      [restart] (restart)
   [end]

   [submenu] (exit) {exit}
      [exit] (logout)
      [exec] (reboot) {systemctl reboot}
      [exec] (poweroff) {systemctl poweroff}
   [end]

[end]

theming fix

I've added the Audacious music player to Kubuntu 20.04, but when I started it up, it looked like this:

Not good. Toolbar buttons don't even show up. This is KDE Plasma 5.18.4. Under System Settings > Appearance, the Global Theme is set to Breeze Dark, as is the Plasma Style. Application Style is set to Breeze.

From the Application Style window, I clicked on the "Configure GNOME/GTK Application Style..." button down at the bottom of the window. In the next window, I could see that the GTK2 and GTK3 themes were set to Breeze, and there was a preview:

I changed the GTK2 and GTK3 themes to Breeze Dark:

Issue fixed:

fluxbox in mx

The February 15 point release of MX includes a Fluxbox session along with the default Xfce. I took a quick look at Fluxbox in MX-19.1 in a live session, but I'll take another look in a few days because it looks like another point release is imminent. Some shots from the older point release:

I don't like that the default menu uses descriptions instead of the application names.

I chose a different desktop wallpaper from the selection that's provided (menu > Look > Background):

Very nice! Looking forward to the next release.

focal, installed

I finally got around to installing Kubuntu 20.04 LTS ("Focal Fossa"). I went with the "Minimal installation" option, which gives me a fair amount of control over what goes into the installed system. I elected to "Download updates while installing Kubuntu" and to "Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats". I chose the "Manual" installation type and set up the partitions myself.

The installation itself went quickly and painlessly. After that, I spent quite a bit of time configuring and customizing things to taste, and now I've got a system that differs quite a bit from the default setup I tested out in the live session.

One thing that was bugging me was that I don't really want to mess around with Ubuntu's controversial snap packages at this time, and I didn't know if there were any snaps present in my new installation. I ran the following command to check:

$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.

No snaps, but then I ran the apt search snapd command, which showed that the snapd package was in fact present. I took care of that by running sudo apt purge snapd. Also, I did some other cleaning:

$ rm -rf ~/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/snapd

I've removed some other things, like unattended-upgrades, vlc, snapd, muon, and plasma-discover. And I added some of my favorite apps: ntp, localepurge, geany, doublecmd-qt, audacious, nomacs, geeqie, mc, synaptic, inxi, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, neofetch.

I'm quite pleased with what I've seen so far. Kubuntu LTS releases have worked out very well for me in the past; as much as I love Debian and Arch, I've been running Kubuntu on my "primary" computer, and Focal Fossa looks even better than previous releases. Here's a link to a review of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS by the great Dedoimedo. Enjoy!

kubuntu focal live

Kubuntu 20.04 LTS ("Focal Fossa") was released last week. I downloaded the iso and took a look around in the live session; I haven't installed it yet, still hanging with 19.10. Some shots:

Discover and Muon:

This was my first look at the Elisa music player (see https://kde.org/applications/multimedia/org.kde.elisa and https://github.com/KDE/elisa), playing some music files from a flash drive. The VLC media player is also included.

An online review of Elisa: https://technastic.com/elisa-music-player-kde/.

Doesn't look like it'll be replacing Audacious on any of my installed systems.

Overall, the live session feels very nice, and it's loaded with enough useful apps to get the user up and running. I finally went into the settings and added a virtual desktop -- I don't see the sense of being limited to only one desktop/workspace, and haven't had to do that since my Windows XP days -- but other than that I didn't tweak the default configurations at all. Nothing but love here for KDE Plasma! I'll get around to trying Kubuntu 20.04 on bare metal soon, hopefully.

pesky address bar

Others besides Dedoimedo have written about how to get rid of the revamped address bar in Firefox 75 and get back to what folks were used to in earlier versions. (See: https://www.ghacks.net/2020/04/08/how-to-restore-the-old-firefox-address-bar/ and https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-firefox-75s-new-address-bar-1842728031)

I haven't tried any of that stuff, but I did get rid of the annoying automatic drop-down list in FF 75. It seems that the following combination of steps was required to get what I wanted:

I removed the "Top Sites" from the New Tabs page, as mentioned in yesterday's post and here.

In Firefox's "Preferences" on the "Home" tab, I have every box unchecked under "Firefox Home Content".

I also have everything unchecked under Search > Search Suggestions.

On the "Privacy & Security" tab, I have every box unchecked in the "Address Bar" section.

Result: No more drop-down list obscuring part of the window when I click in the address bar, suggesting stuff that I don't want to see or click on.

When I open a new tab and start typing in the address bar, the behavior is almost (but not quite!) the same as how I have things set with the current Firefox ESR (68.7.0) from Debian Stable. Very close.

FF 75 in Kubuntu 19.10:

FF ESR in Buster GNOME:

Oh, well, I tried. I can live with it, but others might not be able to.