I use Mandrake 8.2 (Cooker-Devel Version) and in addition to the below points the Mandrake team on the Cooker mailing list respond to questions fairly rapidly (and include feature requests) and have close development ties to their user base. As I use my PC as strictly a desktop machine, and as Redhat seems to be targeting the enterprise more, I find Mandrakes desktop bias and good user assistance more attuned to my needs.
In addition, I won't use Suse because of their weird download restrictions and lack of the new YAST installer with new downloads. I'm sure there are other fantastic desktop distro's (especially the ones who have KDE included, let's face it, all are similar if you're using the same desktop) but I like Mandrakes attitude and business model. They are clearly "for" the user. The Cooker version has some significant upgrades over 8.2 already and in my opinion 8.2 was a few weeks away from being truly ready for release (too many showstopper bugs) but then again, a distro is always "just" a few weeks away from perfection right? ;-) I agree with the negative points, I don't do package selection on install, I do group selections and the end result is a fairly bloated OS but then again, that's what you get when it's easy peezy and practically installs itself. I can simply go through my RPM's in kpackage and uninstall what I don't need anyway so no problems there. 8.2 had a major kernel bug and didn't work with my SB (yikes!) sound card but subsequent kernels have fixed my problem. Overall, I have few complaints, I just hope Mandrakes business model is robust enough so they don't go out of business on me!! Hehe. All joking aside, Mandrake rocks for me... My .02c worth. Christopher Sawtell wrote: > Gareth J Williams wrote: > >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> >>> Not to start a distro war but I'll stick with Madrake thanks... ;-) >> >> >> >> And I'll stick with debian :) >> >> Out of interest though, what distros do all you other list members >> use, and why?.... > > > Mandrake, because: > > 1) It installs like magic. Just works! Easy to understand, and very > intuitive. > 2) It's up to date. > 3) It has a kickstart system so you can produce many identical > machines simply. > 4) Paris is a much nicer city than those which are home to the other > distributions. :-) > 5) So that I can support others. It's much easier to do that if my > machine is the same as theirs. > > There are downsides: > > 1) It installs far too much 'shovel-ware' by default. > 2) It installs the Totally Teutonic Linux-conf system so if you make > an alteration to something fairly fundermental in you system, blasted > Linux-conf undoes all your work. > > Can't think of anything more off the top of my head. > > -- > Sincerely etc., > Christopher Sawtell. > > > >
