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. Now for a brief review of what was under the hood. Mandriva has switched to using systemD, which though not a very obviously faster boot from HD is brilliant when having to boot from Live media. Frankly the prior release of Mandriva was the very very slowest Live boot ever from USB... now it is second in live boot speed only to Fedora. Once again, this may not be critical but it helps. Especially since openSUSE is slow enough when booting from live media as it is, making people think the installer or live boot has frozen. Mandriva also uses the Plymouth splash, which seeing as it resembles the last splash nearly identically I assume it used last time. Since I am unfamiliar with Plymouth vs. Splashy I can only say one should go take a look. There were two show stopping bugs for me, one which we share in some degree. That being the issue with overheating. In Mandriva the overheating was extreme enough to shut my netbook down. From what I understand this is caused by a poor ACPI implementation. One thing that has helped is to add a line pertaining to ACPI into the grub boot options string. We may want to add one of these parameters by default. I apologize for the verbosity of my letter, but considering the number of points I wished to bring up felt it necessary. So in an effort to relieve tedium, I hope my letter has been as engaging of a read as I hoped. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org