big_gie said:
I'm using Mandrake 10.1 now. Wow I am amased! Mandrake 10.1 is the first distro that I've tryed wich recognized almost everything on my computer, without breaking everything.
I'm defenitly switching right now
For me 10.1 Official with the included stock 2.6.8.1 kernel was a dissapointment. The switch from devfs to udev was not transparent at all, and I have encountered very annoying things like system hangups and devices disappearing at the middle of a session.
Other than that it's pretty fine, but I would recommend using kernel 2.6.7tmb (from the contrib repository) with the old devfs daemon (eg adding udev --nomount, or even with -noudev although this may break hotplugging, at your LILO or GRUB configuration). You also have to modify /etc/fstab, because the virtual nodes are different at devfs.
With 2.6.7tmb and devfs it was rock solid.
Anbother annoying thing is that the stock kernel has ALSA built into the kernel instead of laoding it as a module- which means that you have to use the utterly crappy aRts daemon to master ALSA. IMHO ALSA as module and dmix as software mixer is a MUCH better solution.
Of course you can wait for an improved MDK udev implementation in the future.
Another thing that Mandrake (and many other Linux distributors) should do is offering packages built with gcc flags tailored for modern 686 machines- the difference in performance may not seem significant to some, but it IS there.
Another stupid thing in all modern distros is supermount- now Linux acts as windows AND behaves like them... eg I had severe trouble with VMWare when supermount was enabled. No trouble at all, supermount can be disabled easily, but I cannot see why the default should be the dummy way...
A very nice mandrake substitute is PCLinuxOS. It's mandrake core with its own RPM repositories, using synaptic (Debian's package manager) for manipulating dependencies, and simpler, more streamlined MCC structure. It's a liveCd but installs rather easily on HD, and suffice to say that it already offers a beautifully working KDE 3.3.1 while 10.1 is still back tro 3.2.3 (or 3.3.0 for Club members).