Mageia 5 KDE: Terribly implemented distribution; stick to openSUSE or Mint if you want KDE4

Only a month after Mandriva, the company behind the commercial Mandriva Linux distribution, declared bankruptcy, Mageia, the community fork of that distribution, announced its fifth major release since its inception in 2011. The distribution has enjoyed some success since then, currently placing sixth on the Distrowatch popularity rankings. Since I haven’t done a review of a KDE4-based distribution for this blog, I thought it would be a good hole to fill with a review.

Crunchbang++ 1.0: Beautifully minimalist, but a little rough

On February 18, 2015, Crunchbang (!#) lead developer Philip Newborough announced that he would stop developing the popular Linux distribution which had ranked inside the top 20 on Distrowatch in hits per day. Soon after, revivals of the project began, such as Crunchbang++ and Bunsen Labs Linux, the last being the “official” community project, although it only offers a very rough alpha. Meanwhile, Crunchbang++ has had a stable release since April 29, so I thought I would review it and see if it’s ready for prime time.

Linux Mint 17.2 MATE RC: The epitome of elegance

Linux Mint is the most popular Linux distribution in the world, and the third most popular operating system overall. The release candidate of version 17.2, as of the time of writing, has not been announced by lead developer Clement Lefebvre, but the official live images are up on the distribution’s mirrors. Since I reviewed the Cinnamon version when I did my 17.1 review, I thought I’d review the MATE edition this time, the “other” official Mint version.

Linux Lite 2.4: A good lightweight distro, but nothing to write home about

Linux Lite is a relatively new distro that is basically a trimmed down version of the Xubuntu LTS releases. Version 2.4 was released on April 1, 2015, based on Xubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, however remaining with the tried-and-trusted 3.13.0 kernel that has been the base of so many distros since the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

elementary OS 0.3: If you can look past the misplaced philosophy, a great and beautiful distro

elementary OS is one of the newer distros that has catapulted to huge fame. It was introduced in 2010 with the singular aim of making Linux look pretty, and it has achieved that goal pretty well in my opinion. The public seems to think so too, as it ranks seventh in all distributions in page hits on Distrowatch over the past six months. In addition, I had used it for around two weeks in February 2015 as my daily driver and was mostly pleased with it, other than a couple of minor bugs. So I thought I’d review it.

Note: Although I was promising a CentOS review, it didn't play very nicely with VirtualBox, so I couldn't deliver a proper review.

My custom zsh config

As I promised in the last post, I'm going to post my custom zsh config here. You need to have zsh installed (obviously) and your package manager should be apt-get, pacman, yum, or zypper. Otherwise, you can find the links in the script and manually download them.

You can download it from: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qee7hb72n86ap0t/install.zsh?dl=0

When I "release" a new version, you can update to the newest version by typing "update-zshrc" without quotes.

My CentOS review should be coming soon.

I'm finally a full time Linux user

Well, I've been using Linux for barely six months and I'm happy to say that I'm now a full time user! Yesterday, I wiped Windows 10 off my hard disk. I now use Manjaro 0.8.13-rc2 KDE as my daily driver on my school laptop, becoming the second student at my school to use Linux full-time. Writing this blog has helped me learn so much about Linux. It's funny to think, only six months ago, I hardly knew how to use apt-get, and now I'm reviewing distros as a hobby. Here's a screenshot of my desktop:

By the way, the custom zsh config will be coming in the next post. My next review will be on CentOS 7.1. You can expect that in the coming days.