Mandriva Linux 2008 — the worst/best release

Having been through this experience myself I can relate. Everywhere you look you read glowing, exuberant reports of how great distro X is. So you get a copy and give it a whirl only to discover that half your hardware doesn't seem to work, or it installs fine and then just will not boot, or boots but Xorg seems permanently messed up. It would seem as though you got the copy that comes with free extra gremlins.

I gave Mandriva 2008 a try and loved it. It's by far the fastest install I've done. It works beautifully. On my desktop it's great (it struggled with the wireless in the laptop - but then again, every distro with the exception of Mint does too). It's more like the Mandrake of old. Power the box down and sling a new drive in, power it back up and go to Control Center thingy and the drive is added, the partition mounted, sensibly and logically, without human intervention. This beats Ubuntu.

Congrats to Mandriva. From my point of view it's about time you got back to this standard. Long may it continue.

Quoting:Congrats to Mandriva. From my point of view it's about time you got back to this standard. Long may it continue.

I'm very happy with my Mandriva. Even when everyone was complaining about Mandriva a few releases back, it worked flawlessly for me. 2008.0 (Powerpack) is simply the best.

I tried the Mandriva 2008 Live CD a couple of days ago after someone reported a bug in my bugzilla that gnome-hearts failed to build on it (turned out the guy didn't have the right dependencies. RTFM!).

It's not bad, but it didn't wow me either. I liked their control center. Python didn't run from the Live CD which was pretty bad, But overall it was a big reminder as to why I don't like KDE 3.

Looking forward to KDE4 though. GNOME is going to have a tough time catching up to that. If the KDE people build something like glade/libglade for KDE then I'll likely make the switch to KDE4. But alas, last time I asked about that (during T-DOSE) I was told that KDE is still stuck in the "generating GUI C code" area. Such a shame.

> overall it was a big reminder as to why I don't like KDE 3

They have a gnome Live CD as well.

> It's more like the Mandrake of old.

It must be, because the first time I tried Mandriva was probably 2005. It wasn't anything to write home about. I could not understand how they had more than 10 users at that time. It's really an impressive distribution now, at least for potential Windows converts.

I used the Gnome version. I've spent the last couple of weeks using KDE and though it's OK I prefer Gnome. Mandrake 9.0 was my first and then every release through till 10.2 (?) which was, iirc, a bit of a mess.

The is the first distro that ships from an arguably "proper company" that comes with the naughty stuff already added. NVIDIA driver comes with thus allowing for compiz on the live CD instead of having to go through the usual rigmarole to get it working. I realise this will be sand in the eye to the purists - but as already commented on, for new users this is a great idea.

(For "proper company" read "a company that's been in existence for longer than Ubuntu").

I've been using Mandriva since Mandrake 8.2, and I don't think 2005 was that bad, it worked fine for me, I was using Powerpack though, as I am now.

Sabayon has shipped with nVidia drivers for some time now, compiz-fusion and previously beryl enabled on the liveCD. However that being said, Sabayon, being Gentoo based, does not lend itself to newbie friendliness. Nor do I believe that proper company needs to be qualified at all. Produced for fun or profit, does it matter?

Produced for fun or profit, does it matter?

Only when it comes to measuring gravitas.