mandriva One 2008
my personal review

In a drastic attempt to figure out some problems my girlfriend's laptop was having I installed mandriva to see if it was ubuntu that was locking up. I couldn't finding anything (turns out it wasn't ubuntu... hardware issue) causing it in the logs but I was desperate. So I installed the newest Mandriva release to see how it would compare.

Before I get into that let me say that I have not used Mandriva since it was Mandrake and it was based on redhat. I hated it when I tried it and quickly tucked tail and ran back to redhat. I haven't used it since.

So I was very pleasantly surprised by this newest release. It was a very easy install that even my girlfriend could have managed. I was impressed that it suggested her previous partitions as the proper new partitions and didn't want to format /home. Even better, it got her wireless working out of the box, got compiz-fusion going with no issues, running the update manager and updating a few packages got her multimedia keys working. It just worked. And it looked nice. I used the gnome install which is not the suggested file, but was definitely not just an afterthought either. Since then the only issue I have had was with acpi not allowing it to shut down properly... some kernel issue. I simply switched her to the laptop kernel and all was well again. Granted that is a big oops as this is a terrible mistake to make for a desktop distro as this would have been something my girlfriend couldn't have fixed on her own.

The speed of the package management was fantastic. I was very impressed. It wasn't quite as fast as Ubuntu in comparison to my desktop here or my laptop, but it was at least extremely close. Probably about the same if i used synaptic instead of command line apt. The configuation manager mcc was very well laid out and polished.

Overall I'd give it three out of four ubuntu's.