Mageia forum

Hello guys, Racer is here!

A little background about me: Former distro hopper and mostly Mint/Debian user. I had never tried RPM based distros before. My experience with Debian based distros is rich but still my skill level is novice so you can expect questions from me.

Nowadays: Yesterday I had installed Mageia 3 on my 7 year old PC (I was afraid that this will crawl under Mageia...how wrong I was). Installing unsupported version wasn't funny experience - 455+ updates and then dependency hell. Nice end to my hard day! Anyway the update to Mageia 4 went very smooth for my surprise and now I'm a happy Mageia 4 user.

What I hate about the whole process: BLOAT, bloat, bloat! I installed only KDE 4 (choosing "Other" option) and still KDE was bloated with unwanted programs. For my surprise (again) casual programs like "KSnapshot" were missing but some others which I will never use were there... Also the install process feels like a beta test. Really where are the options to set a computer name, why I have so bad collection for user avatars, why some ordinary options are hidden (for example full list of countries)?

What I love about Mageia: Beauty and the freedom to choose. I was never a fan of KDE (and still KDE is bloated for me) but man, what things you can do with it... I'm just in love with my system! And I will never switch again to another distro mainly because Mageia is a rolling release and keeps improving. When Mageia 5 is out - I will install it on my laptop too and I'm sure - it will be even better.

PS: Please do not take my bad words too serious, I just point out where Mageia is failling in my eyes. In any case I don't want to blame someone - I want improved Mageia after all.

that is cool like the screenshot you posted its stylish

Personally, I celebrate the bloat. I revel in it, I love it.

At least, this is true when I am doing an install on a modern machine with plenty of speed and space. When I install on a small and/or old box, I don't like the bloat either.

But, really, what is wrong with the bloat? Because of the bloat, installation goes smoothly on almost everything; the drivers are there and the installer finds them. The kernel may be big, but it supports everything. The desktop may be really fat and suck a lot of resources, but the resources are there to be used for something, and the fat desktop gives lots of cool features and a great appearance.

I run KDE with compiz on my Mageia 4 system that has a quad-core processor (Phenom-II 955 which is now 6 year old technology) and 32 GB of RAM. I have 1 TB in SSDs (two 500 GB Samsung EVO 940s), a 3 TB SATA, and a 4 TB SATA. I also have a 9TB iSCSI share connected to my NAS. As I write this post, I have no fewer than 6 virtual machines running on this system (Windows 2000 Pro, OpenSUSE 13.2, a Mageia 4 VM, FreeBSD 6.4, FreeBSD 8.1, and FreeBSD 10.0 with KDE). I have three NICs connected - one upstream to the WAN and two LANs on which I do development, and there is continuous traffic on all three NICs. This workstation is running apache, dhcpd, ntpd, postfix, and a number of other servers.

I also have about 20 Firefox windows open and at least half a dozen Chrome windows. I have about a dozen console windows open (Konsole). I have a couple of Konqueror windows. I have Kmail running, and Amarok is playing music. I'm currently syncing my Android to this workstation; it is plugged in via USB. I have a TOR relay running.

And with all of that, I still have about 12 GB of RAM free, and my processor utilization is hovering around 45% at reduced clock speed; most of the time most of the cores are running at reduced speed - the load is not such that the cores need to run at full speed.

Celebrate the bloat. If you have the horsepower - and the vast majority of modern machines DO have the horsepower - the bloat makes life a LOT easier and makes computers much more friendly.

jiml8 wrote:When I install on a small and/or old box, I don't like the bloat either.

Well, you can select a minimal install and disable suggested packages in installer.
After installation, use

Code: Select all

urpmi --no-suggests task-kde4-minimal

(that is, if you really want to install KDE on a small/old box) and install only the packages that you absolutely need.

There will not be any bloat there.