[ Thanks to Timothy R. Butler for this
link. ]
Our last consideration of Mandrake Linux was early this
year when my colleague Eduardo Sanchez thoroughly reviewed Mandrake
9.0. In that review, Sanchez noted the numerous advances made in
9.0, but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his
enthusiasm. With that considered, we were anxious to find out if
9.1 could again return Mandrake to the amazing quality achieved in
release 8.2.“Because of the various issues we experienced with 9.0, OfB Labs
comparisons ranked the last release behind SuSE Linux 8.1 and
Xandros Desktop 1.0. That raised the question: would 9.1 be up to
the challenge of the competition? To be sure, the competition is
tough. SuSE Linux 8.2 continues to press forward with the overall
excellence that has become SuSE’s hallmark over the past few years.
Xandros Desktop 1.0, while graying somewhat since our consideration
of it a better part of a year ago, also continues to present a
reasonable challenge. The only major flaw in those two
distributions is their non-Free nature (that is, they do not comply
with the Free Software definition or the Open Source
definition)…”