Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kde (348 mails)

[Steven Sroka <sroka.steven@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On 5 September 2011 17:45, Roger Luedecke <roger.luedecke@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Taking Notes from Mandriva
>
>        I recently caught wind that a new version of Mandriva was released. 
> Having
> checked out the last version on the advice of a good friend, and having been
> underwhelmed by it I took a look again to see if I could see the magic he
> spoke of to me. Overall this was indeed a much better release, and were it not
> for a few show-stopping bugs it may very well have remained on my beloved
> netbook.
>        One interesting thing of note is that Mandriva has discontinued their
> multiple versions. They have even abandoned the Gnome environment in favor
> of KDE. However, their approach was quite unique. Clearly like I had, they too
> took away some interesting ideas away from Gnome3; and like me were not
> willing to suffer the bugs. There were a couple interface elements of note.
> They replaced Kickoff with an interesting full screen ordeal with a document
> time-line view called SimpleWelcome. Though many don't like the shifting
> paradigm of including smart phone and tablet interfaces on a desktop, I found
> its layout mostly comfortable on my tiny netbook. It is very reminiscent of
> Gnome3. This was part of their new default Plasma panel called RocketBar. The
> RocketBar is not terribly different from the upstream default, with the
> exception of SimpleWelcome. I personally did like that their Task Manager was
> designed so as to only show the application icon, and not a description. As I
> am fond of docks, I liked this. This is something that should be integrated
> into the Task Manager as a option.
>        When my friend first told me of Mandriva, he told me that it was all 
> about
> the eye-candy and polish. This latest release was certainly a good example of
> that. With a gorgeous new GTK based widget theme, and a simple but elegant
> set of icons and window decoration Mandriva managed to distinguish itself. But
> even before that, it is distinguished in its beautiful boot splash, KDM theme,
> and finally the login splash. Here we can take some pointers seeing as the
> presentation is encouraging to the new user. They see polish and anticipate a
> professional distribution. It is of course not a major technological point...
> but then success rarely comes to the best, but rather to the clever.

Have you seen Chakra's beautiful boot splash and new launcher
(http://www.chakra-project.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=5373)? :)
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