It has been a while since posted the first part of my experiences of the Mandriva 2010.1 Spring upgrade. Since that time I’ve done quite a few things including going on holidays to Vietnam. I’ve also already upgraded to KDE 4.5.2, which contains more bug fixes.
Pros of the 2010.1 upgrade:
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A very smooth upgrade process. I cannot stress more. Only 1 application broke due to an unsatisfiable dependency: Tight VNC could no longer run after the 2010.1 update straightaway since the Mandriva repositories no longer contained the necessary libraries. However it’s a simple matter to install the dependencies yourself, or do as I did and change to Tiger VNC, straight from the Mandriva repos.
Discounting Arch Linux (rolling release distribution), Ubuntu and OpenSuse have all had major headaches for me after upgrading. I would usually need to spend an hour or two after each upgrade just to fix the stuff it broke, but not with this one…so I am pretty impressed. - A refresh of a large part of my software suite.
Cons of the 2010.1 upgrade:
- Tight VNC no longer present.
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Biggest headache was some WINE and KDE configurations changing.
I suppose the biggest benefit was being able to upgrade to KDE 4.5.2 after the 2010.1 update. The newer KDE is really a lot more robust. Plasma seems less prone to breaking now. Some minor irritations still occur such as occasional DBus timeout errors for Klauncher. But after such errors, everything works perfectly again. I haven’t been bothered to dig into it too much as it happens quite rarely.
Another note of caution or trick is that despite KDE being able to “integrate” Google Desktop Gadgets into their Plasmoids system, actually choosing to initiate Google gadgets causes Plasma-desktop to crash every single time, although native Plasmoids work beautifully. The work around is to run Google Gadgets directly, through ggl-qt (assuming a KDE environment) and adding gadgets through there.
All in all I’m quite happy with the result.