Mandriva One 2009:

I've been distro-hopping a bit over the break and have arrived at my new favorite flavor of linux: Mandriva. Since getting started in linux, I pretty much stuck with my first love, Linux Mint, but after an unsuccessful switch to the new Mint 6 (Felicia), I had to abandon ship.

Now, ALL linux distros have their quirks, their little bugs, and some other assorted issues that either need to be remedied (this depends on your level of competence) or tolerated. My level of competence is usually high enough to be able to follow somebody else's fix, but sometimes not high enough to allow me to do so without considerable frustrations and other side issues. After discovering a wealth of graphical problems with my Intel chipset and its open-source driver (thanks Intel), the opinions gleaned pointed to a problem at the kernel level (2.6.27). Whether this is true or not is probably questionable, but after trying some other systems based on this newest linux kernel, the problem was always there, albeit to different degrees. As is often the case with these things, a degree here or there can be the difference between the tolerable and the intolerable...

Now, back towards Mandriva. I'd been running Fedora 10 for most of the last month, with a comparable level of graphical bugs (I've used Fedora before, and I've never been a fan). After having my fill of being underwhelmed, I decided to give a KDE distro a try. This, of course, opens up a whole new set of problems given the instability of 4.1, but I tried it, and it seemed to work for me. If nothing else, I will say that KDE is much prettier than GNOME. Of course, I can't stand the sight of it anyway, and I'm much happier with the GNOME apps and out-of-the-box appearance. But, I digress.... Kubuntu, openSUSE, and Mandriva all use KDE, and I gave them a brief look before rejecting them. Mandriva, however, also has a GNOME release. AHA!! I burned a liveCD and booted into the system.

(My experience with the installer was uneventful, save from a stalled restart that I had to force manually. The system update following install was similarly uneventful.)

Without a doubt, the two best distros for working "out-of-the-box" with my hardware are Linux Mint and Mandriva. Of course, that's just my setup, and everyone has their own experiences with these things. For me, Mandriva worked great from the start. I had to do the usual stuff to get going, namely get the wireless working, but that was really a minor issue. A word of advice: if you use linux, keep copies of the native Windows drivers somewhere handy. A run of ndiswrapper and the .inf file for my Broadcom hardware was all I needed to get up and running.

I love the look of Mandriva (GNOME). The colors are attractive, the packaged background is pretty, the icons look great, and after changing the window borders back to good ol' Clearlooks, everything was just as I like it. Hell, flash support was even already available in Firefox. I haven't tried to see if the system already supports DVD playback and such yet, but I expect it will. It's nice to have a distro where these things are already supported, since that saves a bit of time after install.

Head on over to Adventures in Open Source and read Dan's review of Mandriva One 2009 for some more details on the install process. I would like to note that his sound problems weren't an issue for me. One thing to watch out for, however, is the optional removal of unsupported hardware that you can do during the live install. I tried it, and noticed my volume control dropped off the panel, so something necessary was lost when I used this feature. I reinstalled the system without the optional removal, and haven't had any problems. Maybe I too would've lost sound if I'd continued, but I don't know. My graphical issues are still a (minor) problem, but I don't know that I've the stomach to really try to fix this issue. I blame my hardware.

At some point, I might migrate back over to Mint, but now that I've settled into Mandriva, I don't quite feel the pressure to get back that I did when I was running Fedora. I doubt as though my inital reaction to the problems in Mint 6 would still hold up, and the graphical issues are probably less than what I remember. Nevertheless, the water's nice over here. I highly recommend Mandriva One 2009.