[conspire] Happy New Preferred Application!

[Rick Moen]

Quoting rogerchrisman at gmail.com (rogerchrisman at gmail.com):

> Hi,
> 
> Preferred Application! < Settings
> 
> [Happy New Year to you over there! Keep your distance!

Hi, Roger!  I'm responding so that you don't think you're being ignored,
but my fear is that I might not properly understand what this is about.
(It might be clearer to someone else, and I'll cheerfully and
immediately step aside if anyone has a handle on what you're talking about.)


> Is the current place in Xubuntu to change Web Browser from Firefox to
> Chromium or Debian Sensible Browser.

Sorry, but are you asking whether the correct places to change the
default Web browser in Xubuntu's XFCE desktop environment is...

  Settings > Preferred Applications 

...?

I ask because I'm seriously unclear on _what your question is_.  Also,
experience suggests a bit of wariness, in that you appear to be
inquiring about a Desktop Environment implementation detail, before
saying what problem you've encountered and are trying to solve.

(As an aside, speaking for myself, I don't have XFCE handy in front of
me, let alone the Xubuntu implementation of XFCE, and it's unfortunate 
that you posed a question that can _probably_ be answered most easily
only by a very small number of this mailing list's subscribers.  This is
a LUG, and not a Xubuntu-only group.)

(For the record, this XFCE forum posting, six years ago, said you can 
adjust XFCE's default Web browser via:

  Menu -> Settings -> Preferences

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8737
That is of course an XFCE developer answer, and does not necessarily
carry through to Xubuntu's implementation of XFCE, but probably does.
Warning, though:  I have low confidence that doing that is useful. 
Please read on.)



I've seen, over many years, _lots_ of wasted time pursuing a question 
the user asked that turned out to be irrelevant to the user's actual
problem -- because the user lead with a question he/she didn't know was
irrelevant, and should ideally have instead just described the problem.

So, basically, it would be best for you to start with:  What's the
problem?  Please describe details in chronological order, saying what
you do and what then happens.  For this purpose, it's usually best to
re-demostrate your problem locally _before_ posting, taking down
contemporaneous notes, and _then_ post about the problem.

One of the major reasons problem-solving goes off the rails, sadly, is
that users post their guesses/interpretations about what happened
earlier, rather than taking notes describing in real time the occurrence
(re-demonstrating the problem locally as mentioned).  This looks like it
might be an example of that syndrome:

> I look till I found it because Firefox has been crashing my Xubuntu.

Nobody here is going to know what 'crashing my Xubuntu' means
specifically -- nor how/if you know that Firefox was doing it.  What you
wrote here comes across as a guess/interpretation, and not as raw
diagnostic data.


> Maybe because my screen is big. I don't like, I mean I do like my big
> screen. 

I am utterly mystified about why a 'big' (by which I take it you mean
high-resolution) screen would make Firefox 'crash Xubuntu'.  The one has
no obvious connection to the other.

I'm reduced to shooting in the dark about what problem you're trying
(well, sort of) to describe, so here's one thing you _might_ be talking
about:

Throughout the history of Web browsers on Linux and all other OSes,
many particular releases of particular browsers have been plagued by 
"memory leaks":  That term means that a process grabs more RAM over the 
hours and days the process is running, never yielding it back as free
memory, getting bigger and bigger in RAM, until eventually the OS's 
out-of-memory handler (which in Linux is a kernel tnread colloquially
called the OOM killer) picks processes to force-terminate.  If you're
lucky, the OOM killer kills the Web browser, in that situation.  If
you're not, it might kill something more-indispensible, such as the X11
graphics engine, which would result in your X11 session terminating and
you going back to the X Display Manager graphical login screen.

One way to know what's going on is to periodically check what is hogging
RAM and how much, basically to get to know something about the process
list.

The standard Unix tools to do this are, yes, obtuse and initially
intimidating command-line tools such as ps and top.  But, last I heard, 
XFCE had a shiny-happy graphical front-end to that information called
Task Manager.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/manage-running-processes-with-xfce-task-manager/

That doesn't hide _all_ of the underlying complexity, and in particular
it's on you to understand what "RSS" (resident set size) means as a
measure of a process's RAM footprint, why it's important, and how it
differs from "VSZ" (virtual size).

Anyhow, big picture:  Getting to understand a little better what's going
on in your process list can enable you to spot something with runaway 
RAM usage trends -before- the OOM killer steps in and starts
assassinating program instances.



> It comes as a scrambling of the screen into little squares that
> dis-align themselves in rows and columns. Don't Like! AGh!

Doesn't ring a bell.

But may you should replicate the problem scenario, and this time take
contemporaneous notes.  And, further:


> Maybe Chromium will not cause the dis-alignment of display chunks.
> Maybe Firefox did not cause it. Maybe something else did. Maybe I will
> find out never what did. Therefore I am. Maybe not.

Maybe the Great Space Goat ate it.  Wild speculation basically solves
nothing, unfortunately.  The 'Maybe [x] caused it' approach is
essentially hopeless as a means of solving problems, and the sooner you
stop trying, the sooner you can (maybe?) get somewhere.