[Mageia-discuss] Is LTS still considered?

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:28:45 -0400, andre999 wrote:

> As for the "Smart-Phone madness", as you put it, I couldn't agree more.
> Being a Gnome user, that affects me directly, and although initially
> Gnome will have the classic Gnome appearance available, who knows about
> the future.  

Well, GNOME "classic" is classic only of appearance. Underneath of it is  
completely castrated GNOME 3. Unfortunately even the "Smart-Phone 
madness" is only half of the trouble. 

There were a lot of clashes surrounding 2 rivals GUI, GNOME 3 Shell and 
Unity.  Interestingly enough though nobody ever (AFAIK) mentioned that 
whatever GUI would be, either GNOME 3 Shell, or Unity, or even GNOME 
"classic", the problem is GNOME 3 itself. 

I do not know what would be its future, but today it looks like it is 
deliberately designed as NOT CUSTOMIZABLE DE. It's a nonsense - NOT 
CUSTOMIZABLE Linux DE.

People can agree or disagree on interface, e.g. out of 2 bad things I 
personally would prefer Unity. But this would be my personal preference 
and it's unproductive to be argued. But lack of customisation is 
absolutely unacceptable and crazy idea.

> There are other desktops which use much of the Gnome
> infrastructure which will likely continue a more classic presentation.

I've tried both XFCE and LXDE of different distributions. Out of two XFCE 
is definitely more advanced. But even it is quite significant step back 
from GNOME 2.

> As well, Mageia has KDE.  We intend to keep supporting a wide range of
> desktops.

No offence, but for years I used to say that I never could stand KDE.

Today I have installed Kubuntu and Mageia and I've learned to appreciate 
it. I'm joking on myself saying:"What takes to make hardheaded one to 
like KDE?.. GNOME 3."

> BTW, it would be interesting to know what exactly you don't like about
> the Mageia Control Centre.  The more feedback we have, the more we can
> address any perceived weaknesses.  In addition to the ideas we already
> have, collectively.

My post already looks like an essay. I'm not sure this is the right place 
for an extended feedback. I'll post it here for now. But if you could 
suggest a more appropriate place to do it, I would appreciate it. So, 
here we go...

The problem general to Drak Control Center is inconsistency between GUI 
interfaces of particular tools. 

Some of them provide OK and/or Cancel buttons, which close a particular 
tool and return a user to main Control Center window. IMHO, it is not 
very obvious that clicking such a button will bring you back to the main 
window.

Others provide a File->Close option instead. The result of such selection 
is not obvious again, and in addition is yet to be discovered. 

Again to return to the main window from other tools the only option 
available is to click on Close button at the right top corner of the 
window. The last  leaves a definite impression of shutting down Control 
Center itself.

Some particular Control Center tools.

1. A tool called "Vew and search system logs". 

1.1 Please pay attention, it is not called "Search system logs" which in 
reality it is, since I've not found any way to view any particular log in 
its entirety using this tool.

1.2. "Content of the file" pan is not resizable. If the findings are 
numerous, it's like looking at them through a coin slot and is extremely 
inconvenient.

1.3 There is no way to add any particular log a user would like to see 
(OK, "to search" through). Instead a rather limited number of options is 
offered.

IMHO, though it is not the best, the stock KDE log viewer is actually way 
better and convenient to use.

2. I hated these countless piling up dialog boxes in Control Center tools 
in general and Mageia Software Management tool specifically.

2.1 When you click on Update Your System icon 2 dialog boxes pile up on 
top of each other both carrying the same message:"Please wait." The only 
difference between them is that one disappears way faster then its 
companion.

2.2 Some of the mentioned dialog boxes pop up not taking in account the 
location of their respective parent window.  Some of them pop up at the 
bottom left corner of the desktop though their parent window is placed 
anywhere else, e.g. at the Desktop center. Yet others pop up at the top 
left corner of their parent window and are so small that their short 
title or message cannot be displayed in its entirety.

A lot of time these dialog boxes repeat the information already provided 
by their parent window and/or ask to confirm an action already explicitly 
accepted by the user in the parent window.

E.g. Mageia Control Center shows a number of packages to be updated with 
their respective version numbers. As soon as the user clicks Update 
button a new dialog box is open (at the bottom left corner of the 
desktop, never mind were the parent window is) with the message:"The 
following packages are going to be installed. Is it OK to continue?" 
and... It lists the same packages the user already accepted to be 
installed by clicking Update button. The only new information provided 
here is the total size of install.

After the user clicks OK another dialog box appears showing progress of 
each specific file in update. IMHO it would be way nicer to show progress 
of each individual update in the parent window itself.

2.3 The total update progress is not available to the user. Such 
information information would be way more valuable than the progress of 
each individual file, especially when there is a large number of files to 
be updated. 

2.4 Once being notified of updates available, I tried to run urpmi to 
update my system from console. After urpmi completed update I almost 
immediately get a notification from Software Management tool again. I 
opened it and found the same list of files I'd just updated with urpmi. 
Out of curiosity I accepted and drak as a "good boy" downloaded once 
again the same long list of software and installed them again.

I admit I am not aware yet of urpmi, rpm and Software Management tool 
relationship. I do miss some knowledge here, since I've never used 
neither Mandriva nor certainly Mageia before. But I was expecting 
something I get used to on deb based systems. On them, if I see a GUI 
notification of updates available but choose to open terminal and run 
'apt-get upgrade', the notification goes away right after apt-get 
completes the update. The same happens if in Fedora I would run 'yum 
upgrade' from console, notifications from GUI goes away.

Boy, I wonder if you or somebody else would read up to the end... :-)