Or does it just simply fail? I have always rated Mandriva’s releases highly, and the past year has been especially good for them as the 2008 and 2008.1 have been awesome releases. Therefore the expectations were high when I was loading the Mandriva One 2009 edition to my IBM Thinkpad. After all Mandriva was the first one of the major distributions that would use KDE4 as the primary desktop environment, introducing the ‘next generation of desktop environments’ to the mainstream.

Unfortunately my short test period with the latest Mandy turned out to be such a turn-off, that it ended up being a very short one. Few times in the past Mandriva (formerly known as Mandrake) has hurt their reputation but slipping out a premature release, and unfortunately the history seems to repeat itself. The live CD worked as expected and followed the similar routines as the previous Mandriva releases, except for the fact that it was running KDE4 now. User is prompted for language, keyboard, and timezone settings before the desktop launches. The installer was fast and easy to follow as used to with Mandriva. First quirk I discovered was the fact that the live CD did not shut down properly, and interestingly I was able to reproduce with two very different kinds of PCs that I have handy (the Thinkpad, and an oldish desktop).

After the installation and a hard reset I had my KDE4 desktop up and running. At this point I have to emphasize that I have always favored KDE3.5 over Gnome, so I was hoping the KDE4 experience to be a pleasing one - unfortunately it wasn’t. Instead of simplifying the computer usage, the KDE4 seems to complicate it further.

The Kicker menu (KDE alternative to Windows Start menu) had no surprises, and Mandriva had wisely chosen the old-school menu rather than the Kickoff by Suse. I was very disappointed to see that the over extensive use of the letter ‘K’ in the application names has continued even in KDE4. Kontact, Ktorrent, Kopete, Kmail, Knode, KNetAttach, Kdebluetooth4…that just sucks and looks very unappealing, especially for a new user coming from the Windows land.

The KDE4 has the ability to put all kinds of widgets on the desktop, but unfortunately none of the included ones bring anything useful for the end-user. Analog clock? Dilbert comic strips? Is this really what the next generation has to offer? One very irritating detail is that whenever the mouse pointer moves over an icon or a widget, an ugly toolbar appears from out of nowhere. And what is the use for a desktop applet on the desktop containing the application icons?

Then of course there is the performance. The Thinkpad T41 is not a real powerhouse, but it runs KDE3.5 distros very nicely. Unfortunately the Mandriva One KDE4 was the most sluggish distro I have tried on this hardware and I have tried a lot of them. The memory usage was not bad, but something was dragging down the system performance. And then of course there is the much discussed stability. After my first post-install boot the Mandriva’s automatic updater picked up some updates and while retreiving them the KDE4 crashed. That was after 3 minutes of usage, or so…

And to complete the bashing of Mandriva One 2009, I have to wonder what an earth is their strategy and who are these beta quality releases for? As their 2008 editions have shown, they do have a solid baseline at their hands and they can deliver beatiful desktops for the common user. Unfortunately with their current quality their distrobution will only intrest the most dedicated Mandriva fans and the people interested in trying out the KDE4 (just to be disappointed later).

And the current state of Mandriva just ticks me off, as the do have many things right in their Linux franchise. The Mandriva baseline is good, as proven by 2008 editions and PCLinuxOS. Their hardware selection is also top notch, and so are system configuration tools. And unlike Ubuntu, the people of Mandriva can actualyl make their distros look good. In many areas they have some nice edge over the competition, but as such they are unable to utilize it.