[ Thanks to Grandveau for this link.
]
“Pros: A nice, well-designed cohesive install
which insulates new users from themselves.
Cons: Experienced users will want to take some
time to configure this one, it’s not exactly an optimal setup.
The Verdict – 4 out of 5″
“…many of you will be wondering how easy it is to install. In
a word, painless. I’m not a fan of these pointy-clicky-gui
installer things, but I have to say that the Mandrake install is
about as easy as Linux can be. Mandrake have gone to a reasonable
amount of trouble to ensure that newbies to Linux don’t find
themselves in a situation they can’t deal with. Having installed
Linux more times than I can remember, I found this mildly amusing,
but mostly irritating. But, I’m glad they have taken this attitude,
it’s a big jump from the entirely automated Windows installation to
having to know about partitioning and the like. With the Mandrake
installer, everything is just a click away. Newbies have the option
of using one of their pre-defined installation “classes”, or if you
are a little more experienced you can choose to do an “expert
install”. I chose the latter option. Choosing which packages to
install was easy and quite well designed. All the software was
arranged into a neat little collapsable tree thing, which nicely
(and quite surprisingly sensibly) arranged software into groups.
They’ve also introduced the notion of “mandatory packages”. These
are things like gzip which if you’ve used linux before you’ll know
you can’t live without, but if you’ve never touched any sort of
unix system before, you’ll not know about and probably not bother
installing. I personally think that this is a good move. Long-time
users will install these programs anyway, new-comers need to, and
it’s good to see that they can’t shoot themselves in the foot by
not installing them.”
“If you want a desktop linux, this is it. This is by far the
easiest to use operating system I’ve seen in a long while. That
includes MacOS and Windows. It’s unfortunate that it will take a
few days of configuring to be as fast and as convenient as my
previous install.”