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!

Some Notes on Linux Effects

One of the many attractive features of Linux is the possibility to add beautiful effects to the desktop. Compiz provides the best known set of effects and they can be used both in Gnome and KDE distros. You get this set by installing it from the distribution repositories. However, KDE has its native effects, which are also nice although a bit stiffer: Kwin. (This is Kwin's flipswitch, an application switcher effect that is is also seen in Compiz and in Windows Vista)
However, Compiz also has the Ring Switcher, the Fire-writing, and many other effects. The problem is that some of the possibilities are mutually exclusive. For those who like this kind of eye candy, I'll point out two features in which Compiz and Kwin differ:

1. Different wallpapers in the multiple desktops
As far as I know, this is only possible if you are using Kwin effects. Somehow, the plasma environment does not enable the different wallpapers with Compiz. Here's the desktop display in Compiz. All wallpapers are the same:

2. Skydome
A skydome is the animated background that moves as you rotate the cube in Compiz. It is pretty impressive when you have a background image that merges on both sides.
However, if you have Kwin, although you can change the background, you cannot animate it to follow the rotation of the cube. This is the Kwin cube with its fixed background:

Of course, the Compiz set has a lot more effects than Kwin does. Nevertheless, I've seen that Compiz makes KDE unstable in certain computers. Kwin effects, on the other hand, do not seem to cause this problem.

So, if you want to beautify your KDE distro, take this information into account and remember: No four wallpapers if you get skydome. And yes, there are other effects, too, like the ones that Metisse incorporates. However, that is the matter of a different discussion.

Some people consider effects a waste of computer power. They may be right but, in my modest opinion, the cube, the multiple wallpapers, fire-writing, water, and snow make my computer environment more appealing to me. I find this aspect significant because, believe it or not, those pieces of eye candy become quite relaxing when you are trying to write an article on, say, Japanese acceptance/rejection ambivalent syndrome or the dark night of the soul in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and the muses decide to hide from you. Plus, when the poor souls trapped in Windows 7 Starter see me enjoying my writer's block by playing with the desktop effects, they always ask themselves why I get so many cool features for free and they have to pay to be able to use the over-rated Aeroshake.