Some grips about Mandriva

There are some things about Mandriva that has bothered me for a long time & I just had to vent about them.

1. Logout Options
Whenever you logout of KDE, you will get the standard 3 options, end session, turn off & restart. For some reason, this simple screen does not always appear as u expect it to. There are several situations that will cause the 2nd & 3rd options to simply disappear, leaving only the 'end session' option. I have not been able to find a solution to this problem & I'm generally pissed that they haven't fixed this yet. (This has been there since Mandrake 10.1 possibly earlier) These are the scenarios that will produce this behavior:
A: Enabling 'Automatic Login' upon bootup.
B: Enabling 'Metisse' 3D Desktop.
C: Enabling 'Compiz/Beryl' using 'XGL' NOT with 'AIGLX/Native'
With any of the 3 items above enable, you will see this behavior in KDE when you logout. Wish somebody would fix this up. It's just damn annoying.

2. Repository hdlist.cz download
Adding a repository means downloading the hdlist.cz header file for that source. This file is often HUGE & takes ages to download. Mandriva typically takes over 30 minutes (Including official & plf). In comparison, Ubuntu's synaptics takes about 5 minutes to grab repository headers. (Including for universe & multiverse) Granted that Mandriva's repo headers contain a little more data & info about the packages, this may seem to be an unfair comparison. But even when using the so called 'compressed' index, which contains absolutely no package information, this process still takes a good 15 - 20 minutes. This has not really improved much in Mandriva Spring, however what has improved is the time taken to process and integrate added repos into the urpmi database. This shaves a few second off the post processing, but doesn't help the download speed/size. Rpmdrake still has a long way to go & many usability issues to address before it's even in the same league as Synaptics.

3. Mandriva Control Center
Integration is the problem. There are alot of icons in MCC that are just stupidly redundant with stupidly long & patronising names. There is absolutely NO reason why they can't just be 1 option or 1 application. Here are some examples:
Software Management: Icons for 'Install', 'Remove', 'Update' and 'Sources'. They are all the same application. Why can't we have just 1 icon that says "Software Management"?
Hardware: 'Monitor', 'Graphical Server' and 'Resolution". They all have to do with the display & the monitor. Why do we need 3 icons & 3 separate applications? Why not just have 1 that says "Configure your display"?
Networking: 'Setup', 'Reconfigure', 'Delete', 'Share', 'Misc Settings' & 'Monitor'. They are all about setting up your network. Again why so many separate applications? Can't we have 1 that says 'Configure Network'?
The list goes on unfortunately, over time I've learned to live with it & have grown quite used to it by now. I've always attributed these oddities to the fact that those guys are French, they probably have their brains wired quite differently from mine. I deduced this after trying Suse's Yast & found it to have similar oddities.

That's all for my rants about Mandriva, please don't feel discouraged by my rants, Mandriva is still one of the best distros available today. If I had talked about Ubuntu today, this list would be at least 3 times longer, so don't get me started.