Review of Linux Mandrake 9.0

CoolCat writes "It seems that Mandrake 9.0 has been surpassed or at least catched up by the latest versions of Red Hat and SuSE. OSNews has the review of the new Mandrake version and they have hit a number of bugs and problems. In fact, a number of Mandrake users in the OSNews comment's section agree that this release has been buggy and not a big step from version 8.2 or their competition. I use Mandrake for years and I really hope that the next version will bring us back the good ol' Mandrake we knew..."

Comments

*Very* surprising review...

[joestar]

I didn't get _any_ problem that she mentionned in the review... WindowMaker works for me and everything else! She also mentions "nano" which didn't run correctly. But Nano is not even part of Mandrake 9.0!!! To my understanding, she has something against MandrakeSoft, that's all...

I find Mandrake 9.0 just *great* and beautiful, the best Mandrake ever actually. Even on the desktop, SuSE & Red Hat are not as powerful as Mandrake. When I plug a USB scanner or camera under Red Hat 8.0, I don't have any icon showing up on my desktop...

By the way, there are two (really) interesting news about Mandrake today:

1) Mandrake was awarded "best distro of the year" by Linux Journal Readers (read on http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6380)

2) MandrakeSoft today published their new results (for latest fiscal year), which show an increase of nearly 30% for revenues!
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/news letter/sn021017

Re:*Very* surprising review...

[Tosta Dojen]

I installed Mandrake 9.0 a couple of weeks ago; here is my take:

Installation was a breeze for me. I used 'Expert mode' and had no difficulty with my Logitech Cordless wheel mouse, though I did have to select it manually; it detected as an unwheeled mouse, as I recall. Like the reviewer, I also experienced a failure in the auto-update feature of the installation, though in my case that was due to incorrect network settings I had specified. Had I set those correctly, I probably would have been able to auto-update during install, but I can't say for sure. As for partitioning, I would have liked the ability to type in a number for the partition size instead of moving a slider. The slider wouldn't give me exactly what I wanted.

I have had no trouble with slowness on my single 500 MHz Celery, so I know not of what the reviewer complains. I do know my machine is running faster with Mandrake 9 than it was on Redhat 7.3. All of the applications I have run have worked perfectly, with the occasional exception of Mozilla, but I've upped that to the 1.2alpha, so I expect a few glitches.

Personally, I like the default KDE look; different strokes for different folks, I guess, but to me, improving the 'prettiness' of the GUI is not an issue. Usability, certainly, and the usability is fine. The reviewer just seems to have something against KDE.

With my previous install, (RH 7.3), I had significant slowdowns at times, and plenty of application crashes at random times. For me, Mandrake 9.0 has been nothing but great.

Lame article, but there are a few bugs

[GrouchoMarx]

OK, the author of the article clearly wasn't reviewing the product, she was whining. There is a difference. She convinced me of that when she started complaining about how "the default KDE isn't pretty enough for me". Lady, get a grip. I happen to think it looks quite nice, and I've left it at the default settings for the most part. So there. :-) (Besides, um, what default Desktop? The first time I logged in I was asked "which environment do you want" and given the choice of KDE, GNOME, WindowMaker, and the assorted others I had installed. What's she talking about?)

Still, though, there are a few problems that I've found in the past few days since installing Mandrake 9.

Firstly, during the install, it hung for a long time on the kernel-source package, for reasons I do not understand. After I went to bed and woke up, it finally gave me the option to skip that package. It finished the install, then doubled back to package selection and went through the whole thing again, save for that 99% of everything was already installed, so it only took a few minutes (I selected a few extra packages :-) After that the install went smoothly.

Secondly, UserDrake when run on its own works fine, but if run through the Mandrake Control Center it will not clean up its temp files when closed, which will prevent it from opening next time. (It uses them as lock files.) They can be deleted manually, but it is annoying.

Thirdly, GAIM keeps imploding when I try to send an IM to someone. I think it may be a bug in the MSM module, since it only started after I installed that. :-) A friend of mine said the package is buggy and I should recompile from source, but I'm trying to avoid touching the command line for as long as possible, just to see how long I can last doing that.

Fourthly, several of the OpenGL games, for some reason, still manage to lock my system up cold. I do not understand why, though I'm not sure if it's a Mandrake problem specifically. I have an ATI Radeon 5000 video card, which at least in 8.2 was, somehow, the ONLY Radeon card in existance that lacked OpenGL support. :-) (If someone can explain why BZFlag kill the entire system but TuxRacer works perfectly fine, please let me know.)

Fifthly, I STILL like Mandrake 9. I've yet to have to visit a command line to do ANYTHING since the system was installed. (Though I may have to so that I can get GAIM working.) The Mandrake Control Center is light years ahead of Linuxconf and the assorted other collection of poorly implemented "tools". KDE 3 is also sweet. (I've not tried GNOME 2 yet, I confess.) I LIKE having the distribution come with everything I could possibly want. If I don't like it, I won't install ir or will uninstall it. Duh. (Note to reviewer: In the install you can pick which terminals to install. You must have chosen to install all 7.)

Distro to end all Distros? No. But still overall quite nice.