C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:13:19 -0400 (CLT)

I just tried booting into Mandriva from their demo CD (downloaded via
torrent).  It wasn't a good experience.

I'm wondering about switching from openSuse because of Novel's politics
(the Microsoft stuff), and Mandriva sounded like it was a polished
distribution that used KDE.  There are a couple of reviews out there that
suggested it was similar to opensuse in terms of quality, coverage, etc.

There were various issues.  First, I selected Matisse (or similar) and
then found that I had no window manager, so I had to reboot and select
compiz.  Then I looked at the partitioner - it didn't seem to support RAID
at all (and so made a complete mess of understanding what my disks were
configured as).  The desktop was configured with various "cheesy" effects
and there was no simple way (the right-click configure desktop, or the
yast-equivalent desktop config tool) of disabling them.  It also
completely failed to detect my DSL modem (perhaps this is understandable
as it's only a CD boot, not DVD).  And the Yast-equivalent (control panel
doohickey) seemed much less comprehensive.  Finally, when I tried to exit,
it hung (twice) and I had to use the computer's hard reset button.

I realise that I am very used to openSuse, and have a finely tuned (and
very attractive) setup, but even trying to take my biases into account,
this looked very poor.

Will I have to go back to Debian?  :o(

Andrew