I say that with absolute honesty too! It was nice meeting you. Honestly, I knew part-way through the weekend it probably wasn’t going to work out. I was hesitant to jump ship too quickly, because I really wanted it to work out, however there were a few things that kept coming up that I simply wasn’t able to overcome. To everyone at Mandriva, I do think you all put out a nice distro, and I look forward to keeping up with your progress, and I’ll surely check out 2009.1, but honestly, after getting past the KDE 4 bling you initially provided me, I simply wasn’t comfortable. It was kinda like staying at a hotel - it’s nice for a while, but after a few days you just wanna go home!

Here are some of the issues I ran into:

First - from the time I first installed, something weird was going on with your mirrors. I have a 10+ Meg pipe here at my house, and my net install took 3 hours to complete - probably because I was downloading from a European mirror. I didn’t complain at the time, because I figured since it was release day, all off the mirrors were not synced up yet, and what mirrors were on-line, I assumed, were getting hit pretty hard.

THIS would have been OK - I can understand something like that. The situation got worse, however, instead of better as the weekend went on. Part of this was my fought, part of it wasn’t. To start with, I think I screwed up my mirror-list by trying to get more localized mirrors on there. I then read that I should remove all the sources, and just add them back with the automagical button. This did not work - Error 1. I then read that I should do it with “Easy URPMI” - well, it gave me Cooker repo’s that I had been using unknowingly. Finally, I was able to manually add them back from the command line, but it kept defaulting to some butt-slow mirror in Germany. Hey, I’m in the US, why can’t I use kernel.org? They are a Mandriva mirror! I get good speeds from there - I don’t get good speeds from Germany. I then kept reading that in previous versions of Mandriva you could manually select which mirrros that you want, but this ‘feature’ was removed and ‘improved’ with a process that automatically selected the best mirror for you. Well, news-flash Mandriva guys, it doesn’t work - put it back the way it was! In short what ended up happening was I couldn’t install ANYTHING - I kept getting that stupid “Error 1″. I simply wanted to edit a text file, in my favorite CLi editor, nano (which I’m still shocked wasn’t installed by default), and I couldn’t install it. “Error 1″. I’m beginning to think “Error 1″ was installing Mandriva in the first place!

Secondly, in several areas, there were quite a few areas that lacked professionalism. I noticed misspelled words and grammatical errors in a couple of places, and anywhere that the release was being criticized there were people coming back with “The Mandriva Dev team is overworked - it’s so small!” “Our KDE Team is very small” (I thought you were a KDE distro? Was I wrong???), “We knew there were problems but we released anyway”. IMHO there was a little too much of this. Some of the things I read on the official forums, and in the IRC room were more akin to something I would expect from a small “one-man” distro, not a big company like Mandriva. Huge lack of professionalism in my opinion (but again, this is just my opinion).

Most of the community people I’ve seen seem friendly, but often overly pushy or defensive of the distro. Adam W. comes to mind (I’m seriously not trying to offend you Adam). But, Adam, you show up everywhere the word Mandriva is mentioned on the internet, and put in your $0.02. Often, I don’t think you fully read the context of what you are commenting on (perhaps because you’re the only one trying to read all of the reviews for Mandriva - you are an employee - correct?). I personally found your comment on my blog regarding the Server Kernel being installed by default very unprofessional. You clearly didn’t read what I had written - you simply scanned it, and then fired off a comment basically giving me the impression that you didn’t think I knew what I as talking about, and Mandriva couldn’t do anything wrong. After I corrected you, finally you replied that “Oh, yeah. That IS a bug - it was fixed once but we broke it again before release - I don’t know why really”. That doesn’t sound professional for me.

This overall lack of professionalism (and integrity) is what turned me off to Mandriva the last time I tried it. Let’s have story time

A while back, there was a magazine (I can’t remember which one) which had the 2008.0 Mandriva Power Pack on the cover. I thought that was a great deal, however after I bought the magazine, I was told by you, Adam W. on your forums that I couldn’t have any of the proprietary software that came with the Powerpack because that wasn’t in the agreement with the Magazine. So, if so, why let the Magazine “advertise” the Powerpack, $59 Value? I didn’t get a $59 value, I lost the $15 I paid for the magazine, and I got nothing more than I could have gotten with Mandriva One (I couldn’t even get x86_64 media!

I gave Mandriva a ton of publicity this weekend on my blog, and I only hope that you fix many of the problems currently in the final release since I know over 3,000 people read of me recommending your software - I don’t want my readers to have a bad experience. I fully expect the entire Mandriva flock to descend on my blog and comment away, but I was pretty ticked off this afternoon when I couldn’t install a simple application.

Someone was looking out for me tonight, however. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do - but on a whim I downloaded the “daily-live” build of Kubuntu Intrepid - burned it, said a prayer and rebooted. Finally, after weeks of trying X started on my system. I went through the install, and although I don’t yet have fglrx, I have X and everything is running nicely on the open-source ATI driver. Call me a fanboy if you want, but (K)Ubuntu is the best Desktop distro out there (and becoming the best Server Distro, imho), and even in pre-release stage Kubuntu 8.10 is very polished and professional. Jonathan Riddell and team have done a great job with this release so far, it’s just that due to ATI, this is the first I’ve been able to see of it. I’m not sure what changed, or what got updated, but finally it works, and I can ride it out to RTM. Ubuntu/Kubuntu might not have the fancy control center, but at least I understand how it works, and how to fix it if it breaks. Also, there is absolutely the largest and most helpful community surrounding it if I do run into something that doesn’t work.

I just found my first problem with Mandriva - not a show-stopper by any means, but I feel it’s post worthy as I’m sure it’s affecting many x86_64 users out there (not sure about i586-i686 users).

By default, Mandriva installed both the “Server” and the “Desktop” kernels on my machine, and was booting the “Server” kernel by default.

If you are running Mandriva x86_64, open up a terminal real quick and execute the following command:
uname -a
If you see “server” in there this affects you. If it does, I recommend uninstalling the “Server” kernel and running off of the Desktop kernel.

The biggest differences (from what I gathered scaning the configs really quickly):

Desktop has

• CONFIG_NO_HZ=y (which I disable by adding “nohz=off” to my grub for better VM performance - you may want to keep it enabled for better power management and battery life on a notebook)
• CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y (where the server kernel has CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE set to “y”)
• CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
• CONFIG_HZ=1000

I’m sure there are more differences, but these are what I checked, as they are what I mostly expected to be different…I didn’t read the entire files .

Let me also say that this didn’t turn me off to Mandriva one bit, although I’m not sure why the installer did this - could be a bug, could be intentional. I’m gonna check to see if a bug has been filed, and if not, I’m going to file one to see what response I get.

Also, if anything it strengthened my opinion of Mandriva considering how well it was running w/ less than an ideal Kernel config (it even snappier now, if that was possible!).

I was just reading a blog-post on Planet KDE, and I noticed someone who appeared to be running KDE 4, but with Plastik window decorations, so I looked in Desktop Settings, and sure enough - there it is - my beloved Plastik window decoration.

Life is complete

EDIT: Also, I wanted to note that “Plastique” is a KDE 4 widget style similar to Plastik, and there is a KDE4 port of the Plastik color scheme which can be found here.

EDIT AGAIN: See here for another KDE 4 Window Decoration/Widget Style combo I really like.

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

I had to make one last “Distro-Hop”. First, I felt pretty bad about basically not even trying w/ Mandriva’s RC a few blog posts back, and I’ve read stellar reviews about how great of a job Mandriva did with implementing KDE 4. I wanted back into the land of KDE so badly, there was no way I was going to pass up the release of Mandriva 2009 today.

I had been steadily trying to try Kubuntu Intrepid 8.10, but I’ve yet to get either one of the “official” (Alpha 5, Alpha 6, Beta) builds or one of the “daily” builds to successfully boot into X on my machine after install. I have the same problem with Fedora 10 (Beta/Rawhide), and I think it’s an ATI/Xorg problem - if I’m correct, and this is the case, there will be a lot of disappointed Kubuntu/ATI users come the end of the month if it is not corrected by then. Thing is, I probably won’t find out (at least first hand anyway).

Please don’t regard this post as a review of Mandriva 2009 - these are simply my first impressions upon booting up the system.

First, I have one word: Wow!

Now that I have that out of the way, I can get on with it. I felt really bad in my previous blog-post were I talked about testing out some KDE 4 distro’s when I simply said I wasn’t “comfortable” enough with Mandriva to troubleshoot a pre-release build, and I was mildly scolded by a commenter on that account. I decided to give Mandriva another spin, to see how the RTM bits would fair on my PC, and so far, so phenominal!

I chose to install from the “mini” Free Dual-Arch ISO and do a net-install of the complete distro. I chose this method because there is no “Mandriva One” build for x86_64, and I did this install once before, and I remembered that although this is the “Free” build of the distro, not only can I add my codecs later, I’m asked during install if I want my proprietary video drivers. I was not disappointed in that regard doing this install - it went just as I expected. My only disappointment so far, was with the limited number of mirrors for 2009 right now - I ended up doing my net-install from a  European mirror, which I’m sure took longer than a USA mirror would have taken, not to mention, with so few mirrors apparently online right now, the ones that are there are probably getting hit pretty hard. All in all, it took about 1 hour to complete the install, so I can live with that.

Now, let’s get back to the item at hand - the distro itself!

First, I’m simply amazed at the amount of polish that the Mandriva team has given to KDE 4. It looks better than I thought it could possibly look! I love the theming, and just poking around the desktop, this is the first KDE 4 install of any distro I have done where I didn’t feel like I was going to break my computer simply by clicking the mouse. I need to find some wood to knock on, but I have yet to have Plasma crash on me yet! Besides KDE 4 (or is it?) I’m blown away by the default Font config. My fonts look better on my screen than they ever have, regardless of distro or operating system. Also, I haven’t seen any of the visual inconsistencies I’ve seen with other KDE 4 installs, such as garbage around the system tray icons, etc.

I’ve only made just one settings changes so far. I got rid of the Trashcan widget from the desktop and added one to the “Panel” (Kubuntu habits die hard, I guess ) I also love the more “Traditional” menu by default - I never could get used to “Kickoff”. I also had to edit my Xorg.conf to add compositing (it was set to Disabled) so I could enable Kwin’s desktop effects.

This is honestly about as far as I have gotten, but I wanted to get these initial impressions “down” so to speak while they were fresh. I haven’t gotten deep into the system yet, and I’m sure I will have some things to re-learn.

I’m beginning to question if Ubuntu really is better than other distros, or have I always perceived it as better because of familiarity, and not having to re-learn something. I have never seen this amount of polish in a “just relesed” version of any (kx)Ubuntu to date. This is phenomenal.

Great job Mandriva team! I think you have a new user. I’m going to stick with 2009 through it’s cycle (personal commitment) without distro-hopping (if you know me hold me too this), and if it’s successful, I plan to purchase the 2009.1 Powerpack. Would I pay $59 for Ubuntu? Heck no! Would I pay $59 for this, with all codecs pre-installed, and a few commercial apps? Heck yeah!

Rock on Mandriva! I remember with “Mandrake” was always No. 1 on Distrowatch - perhaps with this release, the tables could be turned!