It may be a good idea to refresh your memory and read it again, or not. The current thread is going to be a rant more than a critical review of a Linux operating system. Essentially Mageia 7 is a fork of Mandriva Linux, which is Debian in the final analysis. All of this is what attracted me to it in the first place because it wasn't Ubuntu. The default install provides a KDE Plasma desktop and that takes up a lot of resources. My nVidia card was not a problem for Mageia. For reasons only known to the gods of Linux it chose to use the motherboard's Intel graphics instead of the nVidia card. One of the more interesting set up options was to dispense with Grub and install rEFind in it's place. rEFind is a boot manager, as opposed to bootloader, and I thought for sure it would conflict with the resident Windows 10 bootmanager. It did not. It simply created a separate partition in which to place the rEFind bootloaders and I can select that partition from the Windows bootmanager. Seems redundant, but I wanted to see how Mageia would handle all that boot stuff. It did remarkably well in that I can now boot into Mageia using both Grub and rEFind. That's all interesting and to its credit, but that's not why I started this thread.
Most of my time on Mageia since it's installation has been spent trying to learn about KDE desktops. I don't consider the ability to use a convoluted desktop environment to be an advantage of Linux. It's an unnecessary complication at its best and a very unfriendly place to try and do some actual work. KDE Plasma would be a Linux lover's dream come true. Take a look at this graphic ...
This is part of what Mageia calls System settings. The left side column lists all the categories that can be adjusted to suit the particular whims and needs of any given user. Lots of choices, as you can see. The right hand side displays about 1/3rd of the options one has to customize the desktop behavior. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg for settings. There are hundreds, a few of which are obvious about what they actually do. Good luck with those which are not so obvious.
Another so called advantage of Linux desktop environments is that many offer what is called virtual desktops. KDE Plasma sets the number to 4. And how does one switch from one virtual desktop to another? It doesn't take long to discover that scrolling the mouse takes you to some random virtual desktop which 3 out of 4 times is not the one you are working in. More than that, the scrolling works at unpredictable and undesirable intervals. I'm trying to navigate though those chaotic System Settings, for example, and suddenly, without warning, I'm on a different desktop. Believe me when I tell you that this feature IS NOT a selling point for Linux vs the single desktop of Windows.
OK, so maybe it's just me. All I want to do is stop the scrolling action, and maybe reduce the virtual window count to a single one. Going down that first column to the logical Hardware>Input Devices, I would expect to find mouse settings wherein I can opt out of scrolling or at least have that button do something less obnoxious. Well, every setting you can think of for the mouse is there, but the one for setting the action associated with the mouse scrolling. I looked everywhere and could not find such a thing. Am I doomed to deal with this option, or is there a cure?
Reasonably you would expect some knowledgeable person in the support forums to laugh wildly and then tell me how incredibly easy it is to stop the scrolling and/or reduce the virtual window count. I wrote up a request for help and waited a full 24 hours before the sub-forum moderator decided he would say something. The setting I was looking for was not in the System Settings for the mouse. Simply right click the desktop and like magic a list of 15 options appears, one of which is to ... Configure Desktop. Clicking that brings up yet another window for Desktop Folder Setup -- Plasma. And, yes, one of the seven categories on the left is for Mouse Actions. Only three Actions are adjustable: Middle-Button, Vertical-Scroll, and Right-Button. Six choices are available under each action item, none of which are to stop the scrolling. However, there is one that says Standard Menu. That stops the scrolling.
You people reading this who are fans of logic and order ... you can't seriously tell me this mish mosh of navigation makes sense and is obvious. No, Windows doesn't have any settings for mouse scrolling other than the number of lines it will jump for each click. That's it, no matter what desktop you are using in Windows, which we all know is just one. The virtual windows in Windows are accessed entirely by an independent icon action and not as a matter of mouse scrolling. Simple, and it just works without 8,309,376 option settings that are mostly hidden.
Well, the guy who answered my query also had an answer for how to reduce the number of virtual desktops via those System Settings in the graphics. It turns out that I already did what he suggested and it did not work, which was the entire point of me posting in the help forum in the first place. I even got an error message that he ignored.
Just to refresh your memory, lest you forget, one of the big reasons I've taken a negative view of Linux operating systems is due to their flexibility. They offer an inordinate number of settings, mostly in hidden or hard to find places. Then, when a doofus like me who has been a Windows fan all his life asks for help in the tech support forums, the question is answered half way or totally ignored. I can't wait to see the follow up replies from people who had problems just like mine, but only in a different way that doesn't apply to the situation.
OK, that's enough ranting for one day.
