Simply beautiful

[penguinclaw]

What a beautiful distro! I came across Maui whilst exploring Distrowatch and was intrigued with the idea of an Ubuntu based Neon KDE distro, so took the plunge and downloaded the iso. I must say I am pleased I did as Maui has gone for a distinctive, and I would say brave, look that sets it apart from other KDE distros I have used.

Everything looks fresh and pleasing to the eye. A lot of thought must have gone into this and I believe it has payed off well. The icons are on the large size, but I think this adds to the look. I come from a mainly openSUSE background so for integration and look to impress me is a very good sign. I haven't come across anything that is a deal breaker in spite of having the latest Plasma and apps.... wow! I would have prefer Amarok to Gmusicbrowser but that is personal taste and is easily sorted! Nvidia drivers were very easy to download using Synaptic; my favoured deb package manager, so bonus points for that too!!

Having Dashboard as default is also excellent. I haven't actually used it before and was pleasantly surprised how easy and intuitive it is.

Any bad points? well apart from my preference of Amarok nothing springs to mind.

So well done to all those involved, I will be sticking around as this is very promising.

[fredhoud]

What a beautiful distro! I came across Maui whilst exploring Distrowatch and was intrigued with the idea of an Ubuntu based Neon KDE distro, so took the plunge and downloaded the iso. I must say I am pleased I did as Maui has gone for a distinctive, and I would say brave, look that sets it apart from other KDE distros I have used.

Everything looks fresh and pleasing to the eye. A lot of thought must have gone into this and I believe it has payed off well. The icons are on the large size, but I think this adds to the look. I come from a mainly openSUSE background so for integration and look to impress me is a very good sign. I haven't come across anything that is a deal breaker in spite of having the latest Plasma and apps.... wow! I would have prefer Amarok to Gmusicbrowser but that is personal taste and is easily sorted! Nvidia drivers were very easy to download using Synaptic; my favoured deb package manager, so bonus points for that too!!

Having Dashboard as default is also excellent. I haven't actually used it before and was pleasantly surprised how easy and intuitive it is.

Any bad points? well apart from my preference of Amarok nothing springs to mind.

So well done to all those involved, I will be sticking around as this is very promising.

[fredhoud]

I just switched my work computer to Maui, after an update on a "rolling release" distro broke my system. I'm simply tired of being worried if the next update will break my system on a rolling release! I'll switch to Maui one by one if my other computers break! I simply love KDE, and time will tell if this is really reliable for every day use!

[kdemeoz]

I echo the positive sentiments. After extensively testing Maui for a couple of weeks in various VMs in my Tower's previous OS, i was sufficiently impressed that earlier this week i migrated my Tower from that OS to Maui. It's [mostly] quite lovely.

Pros:

1. Unlike ALL of Mint 18 KDE, KFedora 24, Kubuntu 16.04, & KDE Neon, i was thrilled to discover that Maui continues on with Dolphin's brilliant & extremely handy Root Actions that i instantly loved in KDE4.
   
2. Maui's Plasma 5.7.5 is better than Mint's 5.6.5, & especially Kubuntu's lousy 5.5.5.
   
3. Restore Previous Session kinda sorta works in Maui, but fails in some of the others.
   
4. Maui seems to use the same Update Manager as Mint, which is marvellous. 
   
5. Maui Devs did a nice job of rationalising the grouping of items in Settings Manager. 
   
6. The onboard software selection is pretty good. 
   
7. Basing Maui on Neon not the frozen Kubuntu is a wonderful decision by the Devs.
   

Cons:

1. Restore Previous Session does not yet work completely. I have several Activities, & multiple VDs. Sadly, upon restart, all previously open windows spread across my various Activities & VDs concatenate onto the first VD of the first Activity. That's better than nothing, but clearly still not correct.
   
2. In Mint KDE i was a heavy user of multiple Desktop Effects [why bother using KDE at all, otherwise?], so i'm pretty familiar with them. KWin was certainly not 100% reliable in Mint KDE4, but it was still pretty good overall. Sadly in Maui, since i installed it "for real" on my SSD [instead of just in VB VMs, which cannot test those Effects given no 3D Acceleration], Plasmashell very frequently crashes. It's terribly disappointing & actually annoying. I really hope it gets fixed in an imminent update.
   
3. The current Maui x64 ISO has a defective Ubiquity Installer. If you choose to encrypt /home during installation, you cannot use the system subsequently [black screen]. A repaired installer was uploaded to the Repos, & must be used during installation, to avoid this serious fault. It then works well.
   
4. The ISO & Checksum files are not PGP-signed yet.
   
5. Initially getting my VPN to work was tricky, but i eventually solved it by installing network-manager-openvpn-gnome. Devs should IMO ensure future ISOs include that.
   

My overall feeling so far is that Maui is a very nice implementation of Plasma5, albeit clearly still needs more work... especially the plasmashell stability. 

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NB - NB - NB --- UPDATE CORRECTION:
Con#2 now is half-deleted, as is "overall feeling". Major improvement now active, per https://forums.mauilinux.org/showthread....9#pid39439