“New install – new problems”, the principle that never failed me
. It did not this time either, though at the first moment I was not that sure... but it turned out to be true anyway.First, the desktop is fast and responsive, idle CPU load seems to be lower than before. Big “+” for that, thanks! I do not know if the newer kernel contribute to that or the latest KDE (most likely, the both), but my first priority is met 100%. Moreover, everything I tried during first 15 minutes of running Mageia3 worked out of the box. I did not even have to check sound settings – PulseAudio, unlike Mageia1, worked well, so I very likely will keep it. Wireless connections are established faster than before, work without problems and automatically re-connected when the system woke up, which is great! Desktop effects, though I do not really use them, worked all (or almost all) unlike in Mageia1. I can’t really add anything here – in my opinion it is a very good result when everything plainly works right after installation.
There are, however, several old problems that I encountered before using Mageia1.
1. Screen brightness still has the same glitches as before, though, as far as I remember, I long ago provided Mageia developers with my hardware specs in order to fix it. OK, will add a corresponding kernel parameter at boot. As before, it also fixed a problem when I couldn’t adjust screen brightness from the battery level applet.
2. Fonts in GTK applications looked as ugly as before, so exactly as before I installed freetype libraries from tainted repos. And again, as before, some color fringing occurred, so I’ll have to edit corresponding config file. Nothing new, just right as before
.And here come the new problems, yeah, as expected
.3. I usually put a weather applet onto my desktop, so I tried two of them pre-installed with plasma. None of them was able to connect to the weather servers, so, as before, I dumped them and used yawp, which a) works, and b) looks even better than other two. I see now this problem is being fixed – the update is in testing repo.
4. Wireless mouse works fine, and so does the touch pad, but I’d like to turn off the touch pad automatically when mouse is connected. In KDE settings they have two (!) separate sections for touch pad with lots of stuff, but I have not found the option I need. So I installed synaptik, as before, but this time it fails to start. I remember, long back I talked about it with Mageia people and thought they changed something...
5. I am not sure if it is a real issue or just some glitches of my network, but at some moments Firefox took really long to connect or to refresh a page and it used ~25% CPU for tens of seconds. Will look into it.
6. I did not find ia_Ora color theme I used before. Why did you guys remove it from KDE? I checked repos – it is still available for Gnome and XFCE. Just strange...
7. One more strange glitch is with pop-ups in MCC software install, it has a very dark background (screen shot). This is the only place where I see that, everywhere else it is totally OK.
8. One more thing that left me kind of puzzled is the number of (active) system services visible via MCC – System. Just reminded me my first experience with Windows Vista after XP
...So this is pretty much everything which concerns Mageia itself and its developers. Not a lot, which is good of course! The most of the problems I encountered were due to KDE...
Remember I that principle from the first paragraph? I really thought that this time it is proven wrong, because all the flaws I saw were kind of familiar to me since... well, maybe KDE 4.5 or even earlier? We all know that how hard the whole KDE team have been working on improving KDE performance and stability, right? But as I mentioned before, there exist certain things in the world, that never change, and one of them is the ability of KDE developers to spoil almost perfect things with new (!) unnecessary bugs or regressions.
9. First, graphics of course – the thing you pay attention immediately. I do not like those ugly system tray icons (take a look at the battery monitor with charge level), but it seems that people really do not mind them. Digital clock applet – it is strange, that font alignment depends on the font – with some the text is centered, with some it is not. Not a big deal, just irritating.
10. The same with keyboard layout – see the screen shot. After several minutes of manipulations with settings it got fixed, but I did not get why people might need two icons for keyboard layout (screen shot).
11. When I want to switch between applications via Alt+Tab, instead of normally working and neat window in KDE 4.6.5 I see this (screen shot).
Overall, rendering of the panel with icons immediately reminded me good old times of KDE 4.2, when everything was... well, essentially like this.
12. I do not find the “shadows” (which I used before) effect in the list, though, such an exotic thing as “explosion” is still there. I found something that might have been its successor in System Settings – Workspace Appearance – Window Decoration – Configure Decoration, but whatever I did, no sighns of shadows of any kind...
13. I turned off Nepomuk, it is present neither in auto-start menu of System settings nor in the list of services in MCC, but why the icon is still in the tray? I do not need it, how am I supposed to remove it? The same applies to Instant Messenger Presence.
This plasma reminder keeps bugging me all the time. It appeared first when I started Akregator and everything seems to work fine without this service, so is it possible to shut it up?
14. When the screen is automatically dimmed according to power saving settings, the bar, showing the brightness level is always displayed. It is irritating, I do not need it, but where can I turn it off? I do not find anything about it in power settings.
15. A few words about the latest Oxygen theme and color setting. Many people seem to like it, but I find it awful. So, I want to change the details I dislike the most, for example, this bright framing of the fields, which does not add any style or functionality, but only distracts attention (I think it was absent in KDE 4.6.5). How am I supposed to do that without touching anything else? Ultimately, I evaded all the problems with Oxygen by just using QtCurve theme and decorations.
So, to sum up, KDE where it is now still looks too buggy to me, which means it probably will never be good enough as they are talking about migration to Qt5, which means new problems and so on and so on... I think I'll have to switch as I am quite tired of this kind of attitude, and the only problem is migration my mailboxes from Kmail and data from KAddressbook.
16. And the last comment: I occasionally bumped into the comparative test of several distros by Phoronix (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... inux&num=1). I do not think that those guys are the top experts in this particular field, but the total failure of Mageia3 is quite disturbing. The settings used seem to me pretty fair, but it looks like there is a problem with a kernel-level performance, see, for example, disk performance test. Could anyone from the team comment upon this?
P.S. Sorry, I can't add more than 3 attachments, so 3 more are in the next post.