Busy weekend with Mageia, LibreOffice, and Liberté

After an intense week, I decided to forget about work this weekend and have some time for my hobby, software testing.  So, I downloaded Mageia 2 RC, LibreOffice 3.4.5, and a Linux distro that I had never heard of: Liberté 2012.1.

Mageia 2 RC
I upgraded my Mageia 2 Beta 3 VirtualMachine and... absolutely nothing happened.  Before some hasty conclusions, I mean NOTHING BAD happened; all my software works, even the Japanese IME with iBus. I guess I will wait until they release the final version to try it on real hardware and to see if my netbook works better with Mageia 2 or if I should keep the previous release.

LibreOffice
I had a previous version, so I upgraded it to have the cool OpenGL effects.  However, I was impressed the most by the great PDF editing feature: with an office suite that can edit PDFs as easily as any other ODF document, MSOffice looks like a real software dinosaur.

The only drawback is that I have not figured out how to enable SCIM to work with it, so I must keep OpenOffice in my Mandriva 2010.2 box to type in Japanese.

Liberté
I must confess that I felt a little anxious about downloading a distro that is so anonymous that even its origin remains undisclosed in DistroWatch.  However, as it is 210MB, I gave it a try.  It enabled Tor and booted without any problem.  Web browsing is done with Gnome Browser.  Liberté includes Abiword for document production and Pidgin as the IM client.  There was no GIMP for image-editing software, which is logical because the purpose of this distro is private communication.  The best part for me is that this distro boots an IME in live mode that includes Anthy for Japanese writing and it works flawlessly with Abiword.  Vive la Liberté !

In my humble opinion, the three of them are promising.

Now I'm downloading the final release of ROSA Marathon...