OfB.biz: A Critical Look at Mandrake 9.0

[ Thanks to Timothy R. Butler for this
link. ]

“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…”

Complete Story