Main Screen + Kickoff Menu |
I have reviewed Korora before. Back then it was called Kororaa (with an extra 'a'), so I guess the name was shortened in a manner similar to that of Facebook (from "TheFacebook"). It's a distribution that essentially offers a bunch of niceties on top of Fedora with GNOME or KDE. This time I tried just the KDE version.
I tried this as a live USB system made with UnetBootin, as making it with MultiSystem gave problems on several occasions. Follow the jump to see what it's like.
Mozilla Firefox + LibreOffice Writer |
The desktop is fairly standard for KDE. The moderately dark blue Korora-branded background is quite elegant. The panel is a little thinner than is typical of KDE, and in that regard it resembles openSUSE a little more. There is a nice document referring users on how to get help, as well as a video that explains in depth how to perform the installation, including tips for past users who are unfamiliar with the newest iteration of the Anaconda installer.
Mozilla Firefox is the default browser, and it comes equipped with a lot of old extensions for KDE integration that makes it oddly look a little more out-of-place. Proprietary codecs appear to be included, as YouTube and Hulu worked fine, as did my laptop's volume keyboard shortcuts.
LibreOffice is the default productivity software included. It is also well-integrated with KDE.
Other installed software includes GIMP, Inkscape, digiKam, Steam, Miro, Blogilo, VLC, Audacity, and Kdenlive, along with standard KDE tools. That accounts for why the ISO file is so big.
YUM Extender |
Skype required installation of the RPM file from the website. After downloading it, I opened it with the Apper package installer. That gave me a strange error message during the installation process that led me to believe that the installation could not be completed. Oddly enough, though, the installation was complete, as I was able to successfully use Skype to carry out a long conversation with both video and audio.
I was able to install Mupen64Plus 1.5 in the usual way. Unfortunately, Korora doesn't seem to be able to find the better available plugins, and the default plugins have basically no customization options, so I was stuck with a GUI that was basically no better than the CLI version. Plus, the frame rates were quite low, which was not good.
Korora used 350 MB of RAM at idle, which is pretty good for KDE. All the usual desktop effects worked fine as well. The system was overall quite fast, though Adobe Flash playback was occasionally a little slow or choppy.
Dolphin + Gwenview + Desktop Cube |
You can get it here.