Hi All,
With the hype finally dying down from the current round of distro releases I thought I would add my two cents into the pool for the next version of Mandrake.
1. With Redhat 8.0 and Suse8.1, both companies have greatly enhanced the user experience with Gnome and KDE respectively. Mandrake should do something special with KDE. For example, redesign the kmenu. Make it more appealing to the end user. Throw around the ideas from kde-look.org for the kmenu and 'Mandrakeize' it :-). What about something completely different like a pie-menu. That would really bring the experience up another notch.
2. Create some window dressings (decorations) that say that this is a Mandrake OS (Suse style). Work on the font rendering (xft2/fontconfig) and/or create some useable fonts. The default blue style that Mandrake seems to use is getting boring now. Develop some new graphics (crystallized?) for your core Mandrake apps rather than custom icons.
3. With the RandR extension hopefully coming to the next release of Mandrake, some of the Control Centre will be made redundant. Redesign it for QT/KDE based rather than GTK based. Mandrake is a KDE-pro company, are they not? I'm not sure on the politics why they decided to go the GTK way, but they should really concentrate on one desktop/toolkit and improve that (lycoris like?).
4. For me, the installer is looking outdated. So how hard is it to change the aesthetics of it. The under-the-hood stuff is still top notch, but the GUI is looking old and unchanged for the last few releases.
5. The package support really get me personally. Why do they include pre-release/beta versions of software in the OFFICIAL stable release. Mandrake 9.1 should only concentrate on released versions of packages. That is where the reliability and security problems come in.
I hope this starts something. If you guys don't like my ideas, say so. Mention your ideas and see if it makes it into the next release. For me Mandrake seems to be losing its focus. It started off as redhat with KDE, but now is trying to be a Jack of all trades. And is now a Master of None. I'll throw around some solutions to my ideas somehow. Thanks for reading this. I hope I haven't bored you too much ;-).
Craig
