Congratulations. Notes on my experience with minor problems

[mdavies5]

Perfect Install and attractive on first use so I looked forward to exploring this distro. I am, by default, a Debian8 user with Cinnamon so I wanted to see the differences and point out some minor problems without being critical. I used Sparky 64 with Mate desktop.
On first use the splash screen(Plymouth?) was attractive but this is replaced by 3 progress bars on subsequent boots; same as Debian8. Would be nice to fix this.
At some stage the Network Manager was disabled; I don't know what caused this. The fix was to delete /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and replace it with NetworkManager.bak.
I used my own conky.rc file and was surprised to find that putting this into my Home directory had no effect; it was necessary to put it in /etc/conky/conky.conf contrary to normal practise. Also my  conky window kept closing. This is common with Mate Desktop and the fix was to replace "own_window_type desktop" with "own_window_type override".
The volume control applet has no effect and it is necessary to use the volume control in client packages.
Also the volume control has no ability to select a default sink. I came across the pacmd command which solved this problem. Debian8 has a similar problem; you can select "Headphones" as default but after waking from suspend it reverts to "Sound Card". The fix in Debian is to define defaults in  ./config/pulse/client.conf. This file does not exist in Sparky; it uses /etc/pulse/client.conf which doesn't allow different settings for different users.
The Device Driver Manager does not work and this has been reported elsewhere. I used Synaptic to install NVidia drivers without problem. Perhaps ddm should be removed from the Control Centre. The same goes for the "Iced Tea ... Panel" which doesn't appear to do anything.
I liked the choice of default apps including some I haven't seen like conky ui and RadioTray. Compton Manager looks interesting but doesn't offer much help. I am sure I can find it somewhere on the Net.
Again, congratulations on a solid release.

[mdavies5]

I found a solution for the volume control problem by installing padevchooser, paprefs, pasystray and pavucontrol. They give complete control over sound options and a useful panel tray icon. On my system though you cannot control volume with keyboard shortcut keys.