Mageia 3 Beta 3, A Quick Test Drive

I tested the Beta 3 of Mageia 3 today.  To summarize my experience, I can say that it looks solid, reliable, and promising.

First, I tried the Live version in my laptop.  After booting, the distro let me use KDE 4.10.  The first thing I noticed was the smoothness of the effects.  Even the cylinder and the sphere work now: 

 

I had absolutely no problem with sound, USB drives, or, more importantly, the wi-fi.  Mageia 3 B3 picked up everything out of the box in Live mode.

Then I installed the distro to a Virtual Machine.  I saw nothing new in the installation process, but after the install, I saw some new artwork in the Mageia Control Center.

Once the repositories were updated, I gave Mageia 3 B3 my Japanese IME test: I installed iBus, Anthy, and Japanese fonts.  To my relief, the IME worked flawlessly with LibreOffice 4:

Finally, I opened some YouTube videos and MP3s and there was nothing to report there, either.

I really liked the progress that the Mageia team has made. Kudos to them!