"I am a relative newcomer to Mandrake. My initiation with GNU/Linux was back in the first half of 2000 with a copy of Red Hat 6.2 Deluxe Workstation I had ordered from the States acting on the advice of a friend. After that, I went through Red Hat 7.1 and 7.2 (I skipped 7.0; it seemed too buggy). But in March 2002 I was so fed up with Red Hat's broken, bug-ridden and substandard KDE setup that I decided to look out for possible alternatives to Red Hat. After a short period, I settled down on Mandrake 8.2. Mandrake 8.2 delighted me with an excellent KDE setup, stability, speed, and a much leaner installation than Red Hat. Indeed, Mandrake 8.2 might be the best out-of-the-box GNU/Linux distribution ever.
"You can see now that I had high expectations for Mandrake 9.0, a distribution that promised to improve on Mandrake 8.2 by offering KDE 3.0x, Gnome 2.0x, gcc 3.2, XFree86 4.2.1, and LSB compliance. This, of course, would be on top of Mandrake's well-known features such as the excellent font installer, the urpmi package manager, and Mandrake's famously easy installation..."
