[Mageia-discuss] Mageia 1...Impressions

[Anshul Jain]

I grabbed the latest KDE Live CD release of Mageia 1from the servers
and promptly installed it. A couple of impressions:-

1. It feels really great to be back to my roots...Mandriva :) The MCC
and the drak tools feel very warm and comforting...

2. The default Plasma theme is Ia Ora...same as that of MDV. I believe
that Mageia should look to discard Ia Ora and use the Air theme for
Plasma, Oxygen as the system theme and Oxygen-GTK for the GTK apps
like MCC etc.

3. Nepomuk and Akonadi seem to be disabled. Since KDEPIM is undergoing
a transition, keeping Akonadi and Nepomuk disabled is probably a good
idea.

4. Fonts are sharp and crisp. However, it seems like subpixel hinting
is disabled and BCI is enabled in freetype. I recompiled the freetype
SRPM with subpixel hinting enabled and installed it. The KDE/QT apps
were sharp, but the GTK fonts were still fuzzy. I Added a quick
10-lcd-filter.conf file in /etc/fonts/conf.avail and I got subpixel
enabled fonts for all GTK apps as well.

5. When I hover the cursor over the taskbar, the plasma popup doesn't
appear smoothy. It fades in from a "blacklish" square to the proper
one. I haven't seen this on openSUSE in the same laptop. I'm using an
Intel graphics card.

6. Alt-F2 brings the launcher at the center of the screen. Not sure
how to make it appear at the top...as its in other KDE distros.

Overall, a solid release. Great job!!

-Anshul