[om-council] Lx 3.0 review

rugyada rugyada at gmail.com
Thu Jan 5 10:39:36 EST 2017


== Mostly @devs ==

Hello,

Very often I surf the web looking for any OM review/article.
The ~good or very good I leave them for our proud, and keep on making
a list with links :)
Sometimes also we can read opinions, although not so good where
however we could find some ideas about what we *could* do better.

Before a next possible discussion on what are my own wishes, I guess
it may be useful if you can give a look to this review.
http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2017/01/openmandriva-lx-30-faint-shadow.html
In particular if you could quickly go through the points:

1. The panel at the bottom of the screen is rather wide. It is because
it uses 2 rows of "classic" buttons with window names instead of
square-sized buttons with application logos as became fashionable
recently.

2. Apart from these buttons, there is a menu button on the left side,
and notification area on the right. This notification area is rich in
icons. Apart from usual USB, network and volume indicators and clocks,
it has clipboard monitor, updates status, wastebin icon, keyboard icon
and a switch between 4 virtual desktops. These notification area icons
are rather large, which makes little sense next to rather narrow
window buttons.

3. The keyboard icon in the notification area is for virtual keyboard
only. You can toggle the on-screen keyboard by right-clicking that
item. There is also a choice between different layouts, including
English, Russian and a half-dozen other languages. However, this
virtual keyboard is useless - it does not transfer anything to the
text window you want to type in. Also useless is the Settings item in
the right-click menu of that icon. It means that the whole concept of
including that icon in the notification area is more than
questionable.
However, if you want to configure your keyboard layout or add another
one, you can follow the guide, which is still applicable to
OpenMandriva 3.0. The only thing I'd like to mention here is that the
configuration window is so wrongly sized that you have to use half a
dozen scroll bars to get to the list of active layouts. This is
nothing new for KDE users since version 3.0, but it has not been
looked at.
Unfortunately, even after configuring English UK + Russian layouts I
was not able to type in Russian. Neither my hotkey nor mouse clicks
allowed me to switch to a Russian layout.

4. Discover Software Center. When you launch it for the first time, it
is empty. You need to refresh the repositories. However, I was not
able to find the "update repositories" function anywhere in that
application. Even though its window showed I had 30 updates, the size
of all updates was zero, which gave me a hint that the list of updates
was not fresh enough.


Notes:
- I noticed in live mode the panel is thin, while in installed system
it become much more large (high). I know that panel size is a given
percent of resolution screen, anyway I run both live and installed
system at the same resolution.
- for 1. I'm not sure to fully understand "classic buttons" vs.
"square-sized buttons". Is it a standard Plasma setting?
- for 4. Guess it's Discover upstream "fault". Or not? FWIW frankly
speaking I never liked this kinda "bugged" bunt-ish piece of sw and
never got the usefulness either :P
- They are reviewing OMLx 3.0 on 3 Jan 2017. Guess it's actually Lx
3.0, not a small oversight (instead of 3.01) since they write "The
latest release from that area of the Linux world is OpenMandriva Lx
3.0. It first saw the light of day on the 18th of August 2016."

Cheers,



-- 
____________________
Best regards,
Cristina



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