OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 on my laptop

Before anything else, let me just say upfront that this is not a technical review.  I am a non-technical Linux user, so what I say here comes exclusively from the perspective of someone who, without understanding much about what is under the hood, appreciates Linux for the smooth ride that it provides.

My previous OpenMandriva Lx 2014 install

My old OpenMandriva Lx 2014. x install was working perfectly: it made the ZaReason Strata laptop work efficiently.   It also looked beautiful, with the four different wallpapers on each workspace, the Ghost KDE theme, and the Cairo dock.  The only problem I had with this system was that I could never manage to make it type in Japanese (I tried SCIM and iBUS to no effect).

Using ROSA Image Writer, I copied the ISO to an USB drive and went to adventure land, installing OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 twice on the same machine, first keeping the home partition of my previous OpenMandriva  and then a clean install.

Now, after I installed OpenMandriva Lx 3.0, this is what I noticed:

1. The installation is fast!  I knew that some Linux OSs can install quickly (Mx took like 5 minutes), but I consider that completing all the process in less than 15 minutes is not bad at all.  And it was very simple, too.  The most complicated part was, as usual, partitioning, but that is because my  laptop is a heptaboot.
2. It is best to do a clean install.  Although it was convenient to have all the files

   

   Visual problems

   and most of the settings there after the installation, I noticed several visual problems with Firefox.  There were unreadable message windows and elements were not properly located. These problems disappeared after I performed a clean install, so they were caused probably by previous settings overlap.
3. With Plasma 5, you must say good-bye to certain aesthetic preferences.  We already know that the KDE team eliminated the possibility of having an independent wallpaper on each workspace, which is a big disappointment.  However, I also saw that the Ghost theme is not working.  Well, one must compromise here with Plasma 5.  You lose some, win some.  But what exactly have I won?
4. OpenMandriva now comes with Japanese input support.  Sort of.  There is a
   mysterious keyboard icon on the task bar.  It turns out that it is Fcitx, an IME. 
   
   With it, one can, in theory, input Japanese characters.  However, I have not managed to make it work, except with a virtual keyboard with kana symbols.  I tried to install iBus, but could not manage to make it work. UPDATE :  Fcitx works perfectly!  I just had to learn how to use it. Here is a tutorial I wrote to that effect.

I am keeping OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 for sure.  In general, I must say that I like the OS and, what I do not like about it is related to my very own Plasma 5 aversion instead of something particular to the OS.  I mean, the OS picked up the wi-fi with no problems, the sound works, effects are working, I saw no crashes, and speed feels good.  Kudos to the OpenMandriva team: their work is awesome.  Of course, I must test other areas; for instance, I need to assess how the OS works with games.  So, my next post will be about that, I guess. 

My new OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 desktop.  Yay!