Living with Mandriva

Just a couple of days ago, I wrote a post about my initial, just after install impressions of Mandriva 2009 (with KDE 4 as the desktop environment). This post has been getting quite a number of hits (~1,300 so far), and has seen incoming links from a number of sites. I’m really happy to see such a positive buzz and vibe around this distro, as even after living with it a few days, I’m still quite happy. Since the release of KDE 4 back in January I’ve yet to load up a distro with KDE 4 as the desktop and be happy. This caused me to flip over to GNOME and explore that for a while, and I just can’t get comfy in GNOME. It has sent me into a tail-spin of distro-hopping that I’m happy to report is over. Have you ever had that feeling that something was just “right”? I get that feeling with Mandriva. I’ve never really given this distro a chance in all of my distro-hopping, and I’m honestly quite sad that I hadn’t until now. I really like the way things are laid out, I like the configuration tools (Mandrake Control Center), and I can “feel” the amount of work and effort that went into making this a quality, professional piece of software - not just a bunch of packages lumped to gether. It “feels” like a complete system.

If you regularly follow my blog, you will have seen just about a week ago, I finally sat down and typed out “my” personal Ubuntu setup guide - basically, the steps I go through setting up an Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu system. Mandriva has made me feel silly for going through all of that - honestly! First off, it feels much faster out of the box, so I have felt less of a need to “tweak” as much. I’m not going to go into great detail, but let me outline what I’ve done so far.

I did “trim-down” some of the default services

I’ve installed just one extra software package that wasn’t installed by default (I installed “Free” from the Dual-Arch DVD, basically doing a net install and selecting Custom, w/ KDE and Development tools and games). That additional package was VirtualBox OSE, which I was quite happy to find in the repo’s (and also to find it actually worked as expected). Although several other distributions include VB in their repo’s, I’ve had less than stellar results with distro-provided builds of VirtualBox, but Mandriva was the exception for me here.

I like Mandriva’s default theme, although I did make one minor change. For the KDE color Scheme, I didn’t feel that black text “fit”. I’m not sure if it was an oversight, but I simply changed it to white to match the Minimize, Maximize and Close controls.

Although the out-of-box font rendering was beautiful, I did turn on subpixel hinting, and I did import some MS fonts. I have set up my fonts according to these screenshots (KDE and Firefox respectively).

KDE:

Firefox:

These settings are a matter of personal tastes, but it gives me a consistent feel to my fonts across all of the machines I use (Windows and Linux).

I wound up turning Kwin’s desktop effects off (for now). I’m not sure if it’s my card (ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, 512MB) or just a lack of maturity in the code (which I’m sure will come in time, if that’s the case), but my desktop just “felt-better” after turning it off. I didn’t necessarily have any problems, it just felt smoother and snappier when them turned off. I did like what I saw however, and I think Kwin will surpass Compiz in both looks and functionality long term.

I removed that ugly, (useless?) Folder-View thing from the desktop, and the Trash Icon. I did add both a Track applet and a launcher for Dophin on my panel however. I did add the attractive “Analog Clock” plasmoid to my desktop. I installed and tried the Weather plasmoid but I wasn’t too thrilled, so I removed it.

That’s pretty much all I’ve done. So far, nothing has crashed, Plasma has behaved itself and everything has “just worked”. Mandriva has made me forget that I’m using KDE 4, which is actually a good thing! They have made KDE feel like KDE again, and not some foreign thing that is installed my computer. Everything works, and it doesn’t feel “fragile” as every other KDE 4 install I’ve tried. So, for that, Thank you Mandriva for giving my KDE back again!

I do hope that other KDE-Centric distributions, such as Kubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora’s KDE Spin can create a KDE 4 environment as smooth and polished as this, as I want to see KDE rise again! When I first started using Linux way back when, almost everyone used KDE (or so it seemed), and lately, especially after the KDE 4 release, I’ve seen a trend towards GNOME, and even other Window Managers such as XFCE, LXDE and OpenBox. While I respect those enviroments and users, I love KDE and I want to see it prosper once again on the Linux desktop!

In closing, a lot of Linux distributions call themselves “Distro-Hopper Stoppers” or something along those lines, but for me, Mandriva was my stopper.

In my last post a few commenters were disappointed that there were no screenshots, so here are a couple for your enjoyment.

EDIT: See here for a new KDE 4 discovery and settings change, and yes another screenshot