For the last half year or so, the little drakes just don't do their job, as they did before. PClinuxOS is a mess and the spring Mandrake still has troubles with VLC and Streamtuner. Mint 6 has none of these: it installs just as switfly and doesn't give the user a permanent headache.
So it is spring, and Mint 6 outgrowes it competitors. By far.

After a horrid experience with 2009.0 I downgraded back to 2008.1. Hopefully this will be more enjoyable.

i installed it yesterday: runs like a dream, with the speedboot stuff making a noticeable difference to startup times. First time i've used KDE4, and very excited about it too: Mandriva have done a nice job with their artwork, and everything looks and feels very polished. KDE4 is proving great already, and it will be fun to try new stuff out.

Will be upgrading friends and family shortly. i think they will be very pleased and excited too!

Again like many other very bad experiances with Mandriva (Mandrake).

Updating was the biggest problem. It would happily update but then bam crash or fail to install leaving the OS broken and unbootable which is great.

If it was to use the Debian package manager then great ^^.

Mandriva is quickly heading towards irrelevancy. While it does the desktop part well, it's not even near the ease and usability of ubuntu.
For the power user/server Mandriva is just making mistakes over mistakes. Ram limits in kernel? Stripping glibc in such a way that some of the highest profile software (pidgin) doesn't even compile on it? Add some really braindead default samba configs and you got a recipe for disaster.

I'm not touching Mandriva again that is for sure.

Heres Latest Scoop From Kitty Litter Box....

on October 23 along with their new all-in-one Z5600 PC built specifically around Windows 7 features. He also confirmed that any Vista-based models purchased in the 30 days prior to this date will be eligible for Microsoft's free upgrade program .... suggestions from ACER website.

Leaving 8 Glorious Months to Use R/C 7, While Others suffer With Break In of SEVEN. TS Drashek

And by change, I mean feeling like I need to reinstall Linux installations each time some new version comes out. I've had some bad experiences trying to update Mandriva from previous versions, maybe I'll just avoid it altogether.

Ack! Fixed.

Mandriva 2009.1 is the best Gnu-Linux FOSS has to offer. Hell, it's the best OS ever. I use Linux on all my pc's, ever since I ditched Fista.

Except for the buggy KDE 4.1, Mandriva 2009.0 beats the crap out of the latest and greatest from the Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, Fedora, SuSe and others.
Fortunately the 2009.1 fixes that and now you can enjoy the most beautiful and user-friendly combo out there: KDE4 + Compiz...

The L'INQ is broken. Please fix it. Not that I can't Google.