Comments on: Mandriva 2009 Linux Review

By: Peterson Spaceport

Peterson Spaceport — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:57:01 +0000

I tried and I loved it while in the LiveCD, and I considered recommending it to newcomers. But I decided to keep recommendation’s focus to Ubuntu. The LiveCD and therefore the fresh installation has a serious (serious because it’s annoying) bug when you try to remove a plasmoid clicking on the red button in the desktop – this seems not to be a lot, but such a simple task coudn’t ever fail – it gives a very bad impression.

There are several other things that really disappointed me. there were erros updating the packages – kdebase4-workspace simply wouldn’t finish downloading even if rpmdrake said it was ok – I had to restart the app three times to get it right… Totem can’t activate plugins at all and can’t play properly .wmv files – and, as I saw on the terminal, the matter with plugins is that gconf is missing – I believe this is a must-have, innit? I don’t realize how couldn’t they miss that and leave Totem without its YouTube functionality.

And the language is not proper: at the first time run, it would say something like “kill the X if this configuration doesnt’t work properly” – I mean, a newbie would never know what the hell is X. Awn, almost forgot, the liveCD couldn’t mount Windows Partitions properly. I had to do it by konsole and my father didn’t like it (I installed it in his computer last night, I was eagerly waiting for an opportunity to try the distro )

I think these problems make it a really dangerous deal recommending it to new users. I’m sticking with Ubuntu for a while – although I really loved Mandriva Control Centre, found it much better than YaST and the look and feel is really polished, nice,’explosively nice’ if Compiz is on.

By: CURTIS

CURTIS — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:26:45 +0000

This is by far the best Linux distro I have ever tried. I would not hesitate to recommend Mandriva 2009 to anyone. If I had to point out a negative it would be the inclusion of Amarok 2 It’s still in beta and not very usable yet.

By: Hari Sankar

Hari Sankar — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:10:56 +0000

Thank you for the review.. i thing am gonna download it right away.. I’m really impressed with all those gadgets.. and also, am very happy to hear that the distro is very stable… (in my pc, KDE 4.0 Was not stable and i had to re-install all things)

By: Adam Williamson

Adam Williamson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:01:47 +0000

Thanks a lot for the review!

Just one tiny nitpick: only ATI and NVIDIA cards use proprietary drivers. Intel, SiS, Matrox and VIA cards are supported via the standard, open source X.org drivers. Actually we support pretty much every graphics card that has a driver available for Linux, we just mention those manufacturers on the release notes because they’re the most commonly used ones.