I've been using Linux for many years -I think since Mandrake 8.0-, mainly using Mandrake, Mandriva, and last years Mageia. I sufered Windows for too many years, I hated -and still hate- it, and I used to say very proued that my computer never crashed, I never had to restart it, etc. since I used Linux. It lacked of some other things, my my computer was always stable and reliable, and also pretty faster than working in Windows. Firefox was thousand years ahead Internet Explorer, faster, safe, stable... Years past and Linux distros developed a lot, they improved many things, but I feel last years those changes came along with more errors, system and programs crashing more often, slower behavior, many programs freezing... But even that the Linux experience was pretty good.
For example, since Mageia 1 or 2, not sure, one of my favourite programs, Amarok, became useless and I gave up using it. I've tried in Mageia 3 and the first time I just tried to load my music collection it froze forever. Useless program for me. But Clementine was working pretty fine and I got used to it. Now, in Mageia 3, I feel Clementine started to behave same as Amarok: freezing all the time, slowing a lot the whole computer...
Exploreing internet is antoher point that is becoming pretty disgusting. Firefox is not a fast explorer anymore, and what is worse, it works faster in my virtual Windows XP, with just 640Mb RAM, than in my main Mageia 3 system with 2Gb RAM. I must kill it so often that it also started to be useless. All the time scripts stop the whole system -the same about scripts in Thunderbird-. I've started to use Chrome more often, but it has some similar problems as it's far from having a fast navigation.
I must use VMWare for my profesional work, tu use a program only running in Windows, and a long time ago I realized if I had firefox and VMWare running the same time, it started to become unstable and veeeeeery slow. Now, the same happens when I'm working in my virtual machine and playing music in Clementine the same time. But in Mageia 3 it's more critical, as almost everyday, sooner or later, my computer freezes, hard drive start to read forever, never stops and system never comes back until I just shut down the computer. I must shut it down and restart at least once a day, yesterday twice, sometimes losing the work I did for the last hour.
I'm using KDE, but I also tried GNOME, thinking that it used to be lighter and faster, but it freezes as well and it's not faster at all. Same problems than in KDE.
Of course, I'll keep using Mageia, I'm not thinking about changing to another distro, but I wonder if Linux is taking the right way, becoming slower from distro to distro. My computer should be now much faster than the one I had when I started to use Linux, but the result is that it works much slower than many years ago. And I use it for the same things, with more or less the same programs.... I guess people working around Linux should think about it, maybe there are more important things than making a better looking distro or better looking programs, if it means the whole system will be slower, will freeze much more often, you'll have to kill programs all the time to make it work better...
I don't know anything about programming, I'm a simple user, so I can only give the impressions of a simple user.
Hope this helps in some way...
Long life to Linux and long life to Mageia
