Phone free again here since October of last year :smug:

Have never in my life owned a smart phone, went without a phone period for several years back in the day. Moved out to the country last year and my cheapie walmart Tracfone wouldn't get any bars, so I chunked it in the trash, don't miss it a bit.

Wife has one, but she stays off it most of the time.

Stupid phones interfere with all my various mad-redneck-scientist projects.

Off-topic: Lxterminal dropped support for faux transparency, I has a sad now.    That was my favorite feature and what made it even better than Mate terminal. With fake transparency it showed my lovely wallpaper in the background instead of whatever folder or directory I was in.

@fmsithred, thank you! Will try.

Trust me, I know about the dependency upon dependency thing, i've borked a thousand installs over the last 15 years trying to figure it out, lol. Nowadays I pretty much know what I can get away with, but of course things change over time....thes days I usually run through list of dependants, then if there's a question I go on the web and do some research.

When I pulled MATE, the system demanded I uninstall Pulse and install Pipewire, I was so giddy at the thought of getting rid of Pulse completely that I just said okay. Shoot, even the old Vuu-do is not free of Pulse completely, something dragged in libpulse0 and I couldn't get rid of it, so I basically dummied it out for a (hacky) solution. So maybe I can dump Pipewire too? Was wondering if it was any good....

I know I should have started from the ground up, but I tried that earlier this year and got so frustrated trying to work with the CLI and apt that I just stopped. Sorry, i'm a GUI guy. Part of that was I had limited time, I actually have all winter now, and I debated for a while about which way to do it, decided to try and see if this way worked first, and now i've got so much work in it I am loathe to start over, day before yesterday I got up at 7 a.m. and worked on it all day until 2:30 a.m. the next morning, slept for about 3-4 hours and got up and went back at it all day.

@Altoid no worried from me about thread-jacking, all this is very informative. But forum decorum being what it is perhaps I should change the title and maybe get Golinux to wave her magic wand and put it in DIY? Mods do what you think is best.

So question number 5:
5. Given that my system was working completely fine for user without polkit running, just needed to use terminal for root things, Would it be at all feasible to write some sort of script that only started polkit up when a request is made for superuser access and then have it shut down once you were done? It eats up a lot of ram running all the time.

Actually they seem cheaper than ever, its what I have used for 15 years, and the nice thing is I have a stack of isos going all the way back with everything I ever did, and every distro I ever tried and liked enough to keep, all on solid media that will never be corrupted as long as I don't have a house fire, lol.

Honestly on a machine as old as the OP's, that's a better choice.

But you're right, 512 mb is gonna be tough. Especially if he wants to try and run a browser. If he had just a gig at least, Vuu-do and a lot of others would work. I've run the old Vuu-do maximal in an old machine with 1 gig, and loaded the liveCD into ram and it worked great, but that was the old 1.07 with the old version of Palemoon.

ETA: What would work great, is Puppy linux from around 2010-2011 or so, before Barry quit for a while and the community bloated the living crap out of it.

It's like I walk out to my truck, put in the key and start it up, but the transmission won't shift out of park today because I didn't use my extra-super-dooper-superuser-key that I didn't know I had or needed to use.

@ceeslans Thank you!

I'm sitting here right now using stock Daedalus from a netinstall I did a year ago, and that's not the behavior it exhibits, plain old su works just like it always did. That's why I didn't expect this. And I never modified anything to do with the $PATH.

The default settings for the system in all the files i've checked are identical in Daedalus installed a year ago and the one I installed last week from the most recent netinstall iso.

I'm an idiot.

Thank you Glenn!

As fsmithred once told me, it is for sure a huge swiss army knife of a program, but it can be confusing because it has so many options and things it can do, so there's a learning curve.  I asked him at one point why it wasn't still around but can't remember what he said about that.

I have a couple different USB sticks I made with it, one just a standard liveUSB, one with persistence. I also have a stick that I did a conventional install one with a swap partition and all just for an experiment, but I think I just used Refracta-installer to do that one.

Ahh, another thought just struck me, forgive me as i'm still a novice at this, but the Daedalus livedcd is a UEFI enabled version, I couldn't even install it on my machine as I use legacy bios and MBR, I could boot the liveCD just fine, but could not install it on my machine.

That's why I made the Mate-mini without that option, so it could be installed on legacy machines.

Possibly yours won't boot that as it's old and also uses MBR/BIOS?

Might try the mini I just made and see if that works if nothing else.

@ceesians true, and there's also that option at the top of the file menu. I was just using that one as it's the easiest to test, since it doesn't require other programs and scripts to work, just lxterminal.

There's a half a dozen others I use and that's what i'm concerned about, resize image, rotate image, edit file as root, open folder as root, set image as wallpaper, view exif data etc.

Basically i'm reproducing the functionality you can get in Caja file manager in MATE by installing the extras from the repo, I really missed that one-click convenience when I started using Openbox and PcmanFM.

Okay, solved the krita thing at least effectively though I still don't know how it happened, logged into root account and it was not happening and there was a message that there were no "templates" installed.

Logged back in to user account and sure enough in the Templates folder there it was, krita appimage. And I was today years old when I learned you could put stuff in Templates and have it appear in context-menus, lol.

But I never put it there or downloaded any krita appimages, so i'm stumped how it got there.

My apologies, been a while since I did this stuff and I should have tested more before posting.

This weird abomination now occurs across all file managers in this install, pcmanfm, pcmanfmqt, and also Caja when i'm running a MATE session.

I don't know when it happened, or whether it was in some update I did, or third party stuff I installed, or maybe one of the appimages i've been trying.

But it obviously stuck something in the system files somewhere that makes it occur in all file-managers. Kinda freaking me out.

Newer pcmanfm gtk version will still just not use right-click extensions, apparently this started happening off and on about 4-5 years ago, about the time they started working with the qt version. It's really aggravating me because in the qt version they seem to want to work at least, they show up in the context-menu at least when you right-click.

Seriously considering using an older version that actually works properly and just pinning it.