Comments on: Distro Review: Mandriva One 2010

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:54:09 +0000

@Thomas – Mandriva is certainly worth a try, though the future of the company behind it is in question at the moment. They are looking for buyers apparently. I hope things work out well for them.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 22 May 2010 13:07:06 +0000

I also like GNOME the best but prefur Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a deeper repo and everything just runs. Tried Fedora and OpenSUSE but, could not get mp3 or MySQL to work. I’ve been using Ubuntu 10.04 since it came out. I don’t the fact they got rid of SUN Java for OpenJDK, not even in the repo’s bad decidtion in may opinion. There is also a bug with compiz that needs to be fixed, I just do use it. I tried using Mint 9 when it came out since it still uses SUN Java JDK but, I don’t like that you can’t do an upgrade you must do a fresh install. After doing a fresh install of Mint 9 I found that firefox crash alot. So for now Ubuntu is probably the best Linux distro but there is alot of room for improvement. I have also tried SUN Solaris but it is just too difficlut to install software and resize a ZFS partion. May even give Mac OS X a try. I am sure I will stay away from Windows 7 since I don’t wish to run virus software. Ubuntu is probably the best OS right now but I still don’t like the look and feel and am very diapionted they have taken SUN Java out of the repos. I like to be able keep both the OS and all the software current by just running update manager not even Mac dose that. Maybe Mandriva can fill these holes it is a great OS mostly needs a deeper repo for me to switch over though.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:05:02 +0000

@Mike – Good news, glad you got the video issue sorted. Sadly I think this may be a problem with the Linux version of Flash, it’s still very much an afterthought from Adobe it seems to me. They don’t have many people working on it. There used to be just one guy doing the Linux port on his own but I hope that’s increased now. Mandriva is a great distro and I’ve never understood why people deride it so much. It’s had it’s ups and downs certainly but it’s in a good position now I think. Thanks for reading.

By: michael from belfast

michael from belfast — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 04:14:30 +0000

Hi Dan,

I have to agree that Mandriva 2010 is a wonderful distro. My 14 year old daughter has been using the KDE version for a while now thanks to my having spotted your excellent review. She has found it to be simple to use, atractive to look at (essential) and 100 per cent reliable. My Arch installation had become a bit of a mess after a couple of recent major updates and I thought it was time to try something different. I decided to give Mandriva a go and opted for the Gnome version, as always (I use mostly Gnome based programs). I have to say that it is perhaps the most solid Linux distro I’ve tried, and I have tried a lot over the last few years. I’m frankly amazed that more people aren’t using it. If the developers maintain this level of quality I can only see Mandriva rise to greater and greater heights of popularity.

The only problem both of us have had with this distro was the old chestnut of the freezing fullscreen flash video, with one additional issue that I hadn’t come across before being that mouse clicks were not detected on some videos (apparently completely at random). I have installed the latest Firefox (3.6.3) on both KDE and Gnome machines and the problem is now resolved for both of us. Everything is just perfect.

Thanks again for your great reviews Dan, I always enjoy reading them.

Best regards,
Mike.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:32:07 +0000

@ton – Your English is better than my so don’t worry. Glad you like Mandriva, it is a really nice distro.

By: Ton

Ton — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:05:36 +0000

i’m a Grumpy Old Men but i like too test all new distro’s; it’s a hobby.
My english is very poor so i have to keep it short;
but mandriva 2010 is so amazing i have no words for it,
run like a dream on old and new hardware (eeepc 4gb!)
developers and programmers my complements and 1000 thanks!

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:08:32 +0000

@michael – I haven’t used the 64 bit version to be honest. I don’t tend to bother with them at the moment. I only have 2gb of RAM in my laptop and when I’ve tried 64bit distros I didn’t see improvements in the kind of tasks I do. In future I might try it again to access more RAM perhaps. I’m glad the 32bit works well for you. 64bit works well for many others as well of course, just not my thing right now.

By: michael

michael — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:05:09 +0000

Dan,

I used Mandriva 2009 a little bit last year, but got a bit frustrated with the Intel graphics problems (now resolved with recent Linux kernel versions) that kept me from switching full-time from Windows, which I finally did a couple of months ago.

I’d tried installing the 64-bit edition of Mandriva 2010 when it came out (actually, I’d tried the Betas and at least one Release Candidate) to no avail. It locked up on me with a black screen, leaving me to hard reboot into a networkless LXDE desktop (I’d selected Gnome, IIRC.)

On a whim, I downloaded the 32-bit iso and flashed a USB stick, just to see if there was any better luck to be had.

This is a NICE distro. I wish they had a 64-bit version in a < 700MB download like, oh, every other major distro that offers 64-bit seems to do, but this is lightning-fast on my machine, seems much snappier than other distros. Might be a keeper.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:34:37 +0000

@Gokhan – I like the Mandriva KDE4 implementation a lot and I’ve talked about it often, so I won’t bore people with all that again. I think it’s a much overlooked distro though and it has a lot to offer. Glad you’re enjoying it.

By: Gökhan

Gökhan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 04:02:25 +0000

Hey Dan, after installing Mandriva Free KDE on my main machine I can´t confirm this either. At least it´s not shown in task manager and it really seems to be their theme. I must say that
a) this is the best KDE distro I tried because KDE is very fast (yepp…feels light) and the developers customized it very well. For example FF doesn´t feel “out of place”. All in all this isn´t just a generic KDE 4 desktop (like Kubuntu).
b) Mandriva is much more userfriendly than I expected!
c) I had no KDE installation problems (but I installed from the Onex64 DVD)

Before I´ve installed an LXDE version [http://www.mandrivauser.de/wordpress/?p=454&cpage=1] on my old Laptop (1,6 GHz Centrino, 512 MB Ram, 32 MB Video Memory) and that´s why I thought it´s the same (LXDE = Openbox + PCManFM + …). Looks really similar.
Btw, the LXDE version is also very good. Lately I´ve been keen on testing LXDE desktops (most unoffical versions), Fedora12, PCLos, OpenSuse 11.1, #! (though more minimalist Openbox) and I found Mandriva to be the best compromise between speed (see specs above) and usability for me.