improvements for 3.4.3 stable, the good, the bad, and the ugly

I have been using the rock stable 3.3.1-1 mepis now for months, and it is awesome. Yesterday I did an hard drive install of 3.4.3 stable to the Desktop computer. I want to state that overall I am happy with the 3.4.3 install. There are improvements in it that I can see right away; 1. I can install my ATI drivers easy, easy, easy. Took me about 10 minutes to configure my Sappfire ATI clone card and get my dual monitors working! This was huge for me, and validated the 3.4.3 install as a keeper. 2. system notifications for sound in all apps/games was turned on by default, a small improvement, but nice one. 3. durniing the hard drive install, I noticed there was no way to stop the format and hit the back button, and check the box "check for bad blocks" (bad sectors), so guessing that it now checks for bad sectors durning format automatically. This is good if it does, as lot of people had this problem with installing on hard drives that had some bad sectors. 4. of course, many programs are newer. 5. I will find more in time, its only been a little more than a day for me to check out 3.4.3 on the hard drive.Nowfor the bad, or not so good;
1. ok, kweather cannot be updated even by Warrens fix on the mepis site. It had to be removed thru synaptic. And then reinstalled thru the snapshot repo's, then Warren's fix worked. So not a big deal right, still can be fixed!
2. a more serious problem; my memorex traveldrive usb flash drive does not mount and is unusable. Most flash drives are not working in 3.4.3 and so far this is the most serious problem so far.
3. I was able to get midi working in 3.3.1 with a combination of timidity and freepats, it dosn't work in 3.4.3
4. Java was not updated and is still at 1.4, I tryed sucessfully (?) to update it in 3.3.1 and even sun web site said I had 1.5.06 installed correctly, but some java games still insisted that it was 1.4 (freerails for one). I followed both the wiki and some mepis posts to upgrade the java, conclusion, upgrading to Java 1.5 is a major upgrade as all the multimedia apps, that just work, probably depend on them.
5. there is supposted to be some kind of problem with the floppy mounts? Warren stated that I believe, that it is working but not quite 100%. Have not tryed that yet myself.
6. I would like to see libenchant1c2 and its dependancies installed in the next release. These are basic gnome dependancies that don't show up in synaptic or apt-get when people try to install a lot of gnome type programs, that usually don't work, and they don't know why. These are very small files too. While not a big deal to me, as I know how to do it, it generates a lot of forum space.

In conclusion, I would say that the 3.4.3 hard drive install will not leave my desktop computer, however for my laptops, 3.3.1 is the way to go, as everything works there. I think in time, the bugs in 3.4.3 will be fixed, and probably in this forum. Still, 3.4.3 is a worthy effort on Warren's part. It is hard to almost impossible to find a linux distrobution where 100% works. 3.3.1-1 was one, perhaps Kanotix too. PCLinux came close, except for the lan cards not working on laptops out of the box, as in whoops, no internet. They do seem to have a fix for that one in their forums. Only thing I dislike very much about Kanotix is that most of their users speak German and I do not. So the forum has far less in english, harder to find how to do this or that there. Guess Mepislovers forum has spoiled me.