Notes from the Field: Mandriva 2009 KDE Alpha 2
Submitted by srlinuxx on Sat, 07/12/2008 - 17:08.
Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 hit the wires yesterday for both the KDE and Gnome desktops. As usual I did the download/ISO burn/boot three-step to check out the KDE version. And as usual, in spite of glowing reviews it had enough rough edges to constantly remind me this is an alpha release. This is not to slam Mandriva (I'm now a satisfied paying customer), but the web sites that put up the multitudinous screen shots and gush effusively how pretty it all looks. Nobody seems to really dig in and use the distribution. If they did they might discover that many of the latest distributions are not just pretty, but pretty useless. If you want a good distribution then Mandriva 2008.1 is one of the best, if not the best, of the current crop of distributions, certainly rating far better than Ubuntu 8.04.
I choose to test the KDE desktop because Mandriva 2009 will eventually be shipped using KDE 4.1, everone's favorite desktop. Alpha 2 is also supposed to be shipped with the latest video drivers for both ATI and nVidia, which means that it should also support Compiz. Unfortunately alpha 2 did not, even though the current version of Mandriva does, and quite well.
In this screen shot I've got Dolphin looking at all the storage devices available on europa, including the Windows XP (NTFS) drives.
Unjustified hysteria
I partially agree with your criticism on KDE4. Nevertheless, there is some buzz circulating across the web which is simply not true. I've tested it on the exact same Mandriva alpha release and was pleasantly surprised with a few details. Dolphin supports tabs and any kind of protocol i type in the address bar (or at least the protocols i use more often; s/FTP). It is possible to add shortcuts to the desktop, not only the damn widgets (i read somewhere it wasn't).
I found it harder to move the bottom panel elsewhere, for instance, though after a while i figured out how to do it.
In a nutshell, KDE 4 is going in the proper direction and in spite of my current commitment to KDE 3.5.9, i'll certainly opt-in KDE 4 a lot sooner than i thought.