I took the opportunity to install 9.1b2 on a PC at home. Just to have a look around. My first impression when it came up was:
eeYuck!
Sorry guys, I disliked the look so much, I took it off.
IMHO... It's over the top on eye-candy, and severly lacking in content.
Ok, it's a beta.. I understand that. But IMHO it was still ugly.
My objection:
Way to much eye-candy. So much so, that it wasn't sweet anymore.
The fonts suck (IMHO). On my system, they just looked tacky, and made things hard to read. I couldn't even blame it on missing fonts, because MDK did the install. So if anything was missing, it's because MDK didn't install it.
Most of what I used wasn't installed (by default). I didn't even get a useable e-Mail client. The only thing it installed was Kmail... I had to dig around to find Mozilla Mail, and install that. I thought I remembered someone here mentioning that Evolution 1.2 was included with 9.1.. not so. It ain't on the CDs.
Yes, I understand. It's a beta. It's put out to garner opinions, and to help track down bugs. But in my case, and IMHO, it was just to ugly to use.
Mandrake needs to back off the fonts nonsense, and focus on content, not candy.
I took it off, and put RH 8.0 on. Bluecuve is a world better than the mess on the 9.1b2 desktop. If I want a system that looks like it was designed by PlaySchool, I'll by an XP machine, or a MAC. I came to Linux many years ago to get away from that.
I'll take another look as it aproaches release.
The above is just my opinion. Not a statement of fact. There is therefore nothing above to argue over. It's just an opinion. I thought Mandrake should hear something besides "Ohh.. ahh.. lookit the pretty fonts..." Personally, I think it just made it hard to read, and harder to use.
If that's the direction MDK is taking their distro, I'll go back to a serious distro, and return to RedHat. I'm not interested in XP-Linux.
JMHO-YMMV
Ric
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