The Mandriva / Mageia Dilemma

As with alot of Mandriva users, I have a dilemma. Of course I'm talking about the question of whether to continue with Mandriva or move over to Mageia. I've tried them both out on a spare machine & I have problems with both of them. Lets see if I can list them out here.

My problems with Mandriva 2011:
- I really cannot get myself to like the Rosa launcher and taskbar.
- KnetworkManager intermittently fails to connect to my hidden WPA2 Wifi.
- Abandoning of the tools I've come to love & rely on. (draknetcenter, RPMDrake, etc.)
- I have no confidence in Mandriva (the company). I no longer trust them.

My problems with Mageia 1:
- Is exactly Mandriva 2010.2. (feels very dated)
- Very ugly icons and fonts. (why is the graphics and sound & video icons exactly the same?) UI styling, color scheme is so dated.
- Slow bootup. Still no systemd.

I really don't want to stay with Mandriva anymore & be at the mercy of that company but Mageia at the moment just looks so crap that I'm serious considering going with Mandriva 2011. I managed to stop myself & at least for now I'm keeping Mandriva 2010.2 on my main machine. Until they end security update support for it.

I know most of my complaints of Mageia are superficial and can be improved with some amount of tweaking, I did try doing that on my spare machine but one thing still makes me unhappy, that is getting a consistent look for both Qt and GTK+ applications. Whenever I get a look I like on Qt, it will screw up on the GTK+ side. So right now, I'm stuck on using the oxygen theme & color scheme, it seems to be the only one that looks good. (only due to oxygen-gtk)

I'm still gonna hold out upgrading. I'm hoping that Mageia 2 will bring them up to date and be pretty and innovative again. I can only hope.

CSSU, Nitdroid and Preenv-hd

I've been running CSSU for a few months & it's been exceptionally stable. There are crashes here there, especially with some application that didn't like to be started in portrait mode. Battery life seems to suffer a bit with all the auto-rotation going on. But overall, the experience has been positive.

I also installed Nitdroid 2 weeks ago. Mainly just to fool around & play some games I'm missing out on. I install the N12 UMay release of Gingerbread onto an Apacer 8GB Class 10 MicroSDHC card. It takes about 3 minutes to boot, in operations it's a little laggy, but bearable. I only play some games, so it's all I need. It's definitely NOT recommended to run the Nitdroid as the main OS, alot of things still don't work. For one, you can't make phone calls, can't take pictures & also the phone doesn't manage power well, it runs really hot when playing games & sucks through the battery in only an hour or 2. The battery meter is screwed too, so you won't know you're dry till it switches off.

Anyway, I got tired of Android & I'm back to running Maemo again. I was searching for games when I stumbled onto preenv-hd. Someone made a patch over Preenv 0.1.7 that allowed HP Touchpad games to be playable through Preenv. This is great since there a few more games for WebOS that are for the Touchpad only. I found a few I really liked:
- DoodlePoolHD
- Slice It! HD
- Quell HD
Not the mention the more updated versions of Angry Birds Rio and Seasons.
So preenv-hd is keeping my inner gamer happy for now.