From The Chief Editor's Desk

It's not very often we get to say this, but this month we have something new for you. Thanks to ms_meme, we have expanded our monthly PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions. Ms_meme has made a new puzzle, which she calls Cryptograms. It features a quote from a PCLinuxOS user that was made in the PCLinuxOS forum, with a new one every month.

Ms_meme reports loving to do the cryptogram puzzle in the daily newspaper. Who better to create our new puzzle than someone who not only loves doing them, but who also seems to be very good at them. Until she came bearing her gift, I had no idea of her affinity for the cryptogram puzzles.

So, if you're into puzzles ... and specifically, the cryptogram style of puzzles ... you're in for a treat. The monthly Cryptogram puzzle features some of ms_meme's excellent artwork, which also changes every month. Thank you, ms_meme, for unselfishly sharing your vast talents.

The most astonishing thing happened on my daily trip through the PCLinuxOS forum recently. Some users were complaining about random freezes with the new KDE5. That is, until mrfill posted about a possible solution: turning off the KDE5 wallpaper slideshow.

I had been experiencing random freezes on Xfce for several months. Originally, I chalked it up to a heat problem. But the random freezes persisted. Then, I chalked it up to a variety of different programs. I pared down the programs I ran all the time to just the very bare minimum, but the random freezes persisted. Then, I thought maybe it was just hardware gremlins, because that was the only other thing that made sense. The problem was frustrating and infuriating, without any solution in sight.

That was, until I read mrfill's post in the forum. I use the Xfce desktop environment, and as such, I use the Xfce's desktop wallpaper slideshow setting to change my wallpaper every five minutes. Correction, I used to use the slideshow. I figured that since both were open source projects, they just might share some common code. So, I figured it was worth a shot. I turned off the slideshow, and what would you know. I haven't had a random freeze in over three days (and counting) as I write this for the magazine.

I have a bash script I wrote a few years back that performs a wallpaper slideshow (it appeared in the magazine), but I haven't tried it recently. When I did use it previously, it worked well ... and I don't recall any random freezes occurring from its use. Right now, I'm enjoying being free from the random freezes. Should I ever get the inkling to setup a wallpaper slideshow in the future, this is probably the route I will take.

I haven't looked at the code to compare the Xfce and KDE5 versions of the desktop wallpaper slideshow. But given the positive results, I have to say that it is very likely that they share the same code (or code segments) that are responsible for the random freezes. So, I guess the lesson here is that even though solutions are posted for a desktop environment that you don't use, don't discount them just because it's for a different desktop environment. There's a chance that it might just help fix a similar problem you are experiencing on the desktop environment you do use.

Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity.