I am considering trying Mandriva 2008.1 (gnome edition)

[karellen]

and I wanted to know how well it worked for others who have already used it for some time
what interests me the most:
1) stability
2) available packages from the repos
3) the package manager (speed, stability)
4) overall look and feel
feel free to give your feedbacks
thanks :)

[anshuljain]

and I wanted to know how well it worked for others who have already used it for some time
what interests me the most:
1) stability
2) available packages from the repos
3) the package manager (speed, stability)
4) overall look and feel
feel free to give your feedbacks
thanks :)

I've been using Mandriva for a while now and consider it to be my #1 distro and with regards to your questions...

1. Rock solid and very stable. Mandriva was known to be a KDE-centric distro..but I find the recent GNOME ones to be better than its KDE sibling. I've never had GNOME Mandriva crash on my desktop...

2. Plenty of packages...and more...:) Not a worry there.

3. URPMI is the default and is very very good and quite underrated. I find it to be as good as APT. You also have an option to use Smart or APT.

4. Fantastic look and feel, MCC is very well integrated into the environment since it is GTK-based. The artwork behind the wallpaper and screensavers is by far the best. Combine the Mandriva artwork with the Fedora Nodoka theme is the slickest looking distro out there in the market. Overall..a 10/10!

-Anshul

[darksong]

Mandriva is a pretty sweet distro. I find it to be more desktop read than ubuntu. More stable as well. Updates don't break the distro as in ubuntu.

[karellen]

thanks for the replies. after 2 hours of using Mandriva, I see that the optimistic tone was justified. I really like it - the fonts, the way gnome looks, the icons, the various tools and wizards for various tasks, the control center. I've used urpmi to install some apps and seems pretty snapy and solid. I have the feeling that it will stay on my machine for a long time

[AdamWill]

Glad to hear you're enjoying Mandriva :). These are great forums, but we do also have official Mandriva forums at http://forum.mandriva.com/ , feel free to drop in there too. Welcome!

[anshuljain]

thanks for the replies. after 2 hours of using Mandriva, I see that the optimistic tone was justified. I really like it - the fonts, the way gnome looks, the icons, the various tools and wizards for various tasks, the control center. I've used urpmi to install some apps and seems pretty snapy and solid. I have the feeling that it will stay on my machine for a long time

A small tip on enabling some restricted stuff like multimedia codecs, fonts etc...visit http://easyurpmi.zarb.org to setup the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) repositories.

-Anshul

[karellen]

Glad to hear you're enjoying Mandriva :). These are great forums, but we do also have official Mandriva forums at http://forum.mandriva.com/ , feel free to drop in there too. Welcome!

I just did ;)
http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=87190