Mageia 3 on XPS 12

In part of my newest acquisition, I tried out Magiea 3 on a XPS 12. As I only went for the live experience, I never got to try the full experience as I never decided to install it. The reason? Basically a lot of the hardware was not working, unfortunately. The touch screen was not working out of the box, but to me that was not really a big deal, as no Linux distro so far have been able to use that efficiently. The touchpad was not working at all. As it is basically a multitouch pad, you need the multi touch functionality enabled to make it work, as you cannot click it if it doesn’t work. This did not work, which was the biggest deal breaker for me, especially since a quick Google resulted in a forum post recommending to submit to the bug tracker. Among other things that did not work, was the wireless card. I did some testing, and found that the proper drivers were installed, they just did not work. I tried the Mageia Control Center option, but the only option there was to install a driver via ndiswrapper, or the Windows Driver. I tried to manually modprode the relevant drivers, but unfortunately I am not that familiar with the hardware that I know all the drivers required for this card. My honest opinion? The drivers were available, just not loaded for some reason or another.

Now, for the positive part. This is the first GNOME 3 desktop I have ever enjoyed. Maybe it is because I am getting used to the Unity desktop from Ubuntu, but I was still fairly impressed with it. It could use some better window control options, like minimize and maximize, but the snap to maximize works fairly well, and the other 3D eye candy was also working well. However, as I was not able to get online, everything else was kinda stumped. These days, I will not even consider installing a computer unless I can get the wireless to work, and I had high confidence with Mageia, as I have previously used Mandriva and drakxconfig with high success rate on difficult hardware. Earlier I have praised it as one of the best GUI config tools available in Linux, and I am still of that opinion, I am just highly disappointed in the distro in general for not being able to properly detect my hardware and configure accordingly.

As Mageia 4 is reading for release, I might consider revisiting, as Mageia 3 looked like a solid desktop experience, but unfortunately it did not meet my hardware requirements. My next endeavor really should be Arch Linux, as it is my favorite Linux distribution ever made, but as Ubuntu simply just work for this hardware, I am finding my self kinda locked to that.