Mandriva One 2008.1 (spring), I want to like it…

I downloaded a Mandriva One 2008.1 disc to try out the other day, and tried it on three systems:

What I found is that while Mandriva is definitely a good distribution from many points, it still has some pretty damning problems that rule it out for new users.

This isn’t meant to be an all-inclusive review, just a few highlights for what to expect if you’re familiar with Linux, and are considering Mandriva:

What I like about Mandriva One:

Well, it downloaded the KDE edition by default, I think I’ve made it quite clear I generally dislike KDE, but Mandriva managed to smooth over some of the things that Kubuntu or Suse, etc. do to anger me.

Kubuntu makes you go grab Firefox separately or else you’re left with Konqueror, Mandriva makes Firefox the default browser and it blends in well with KDE, something that other KDE distros don’t often worry about.

Mandriva had the good sense to stay with KDE 3.5.9 while KDE 4 is still iffy,

Overall, the Mandriva Control Center is nice, it’s like Yast2 in Suse, only with Yast there will be a skeleton found in front of your computer before the software installation is finished, Mandriva’s RPMdrake gets it done today.

MCC also gives you fine grained control over system security, user accounts…you name it, you’ve got it.

Mandriva One has most of the stuff you’ll need to get it running, codecs and drivers and such.

What I didn’t like about Mandriva One:

Defaults to Firefox 2, even though 3 has been out for some time.

Mandriva One is 32-bit only.

It isn’t very clear about what you need to do to obtain Broadcom wireless firmware, it includes b43-fwcutter, but can’t use the firmware it cuts, finally after poking around, I noticed it uses the deprecated bcm43xx-fwcutter.

Severe problems with the included Nvidia display driver, it cannot recognize display modes above 1280 x 1024, nvidia-settings appears crippled, nvidia-xconfig won’t help either.

I ended up removing the driver myself and installing 173.14 from Nvidia themselves, that worked

To get 64-bit support, you either have to use Mandriva Free and add foreign software repos (easyurpmi.zarb.org helps with this) to get your drivers and codecs, or purchase Mandriva PowerPack subscription for $60…the subscription is good for 12 months, and Mandriva releases about every six months, so you may sneak in a 3rd release if you sign up a month after the release you want is out.

Of course I can’t recommend jumping through hoops for this.

Love it or hate it, Ubuntu takes pretty much all the legwork out of getting a functional system, it’s become the closest thing to an Easy button for setting up a Linux system, I’m not saying this because I really like all the people behind Ubuntu or always agree with them, but they’ve become this current that is getting harder to swim away from.

No distribution stays on top for more than 5-6 years, there’s always a crack in their policies or procedures that a competitor can slip through and use as a one up.

I’m still not sure why Mandriva would go to such lengths to customize their Nvidia drivers, and otherwise make it hell to set your system up.

If you have an Nvidia card, and insist on Mandriva, get Mandriva Free. I was unable to get their bundled driver to behave on anything I used it with.

Unfortunately, this Mandriva One disc is targeted to new users who are evaluating whether to switch from Windows, there’s no reason for the driver issues to be a problem at all, it just looks bad on a promotional product when you’re asking the customer to consider paying for all your Powerpack goodies.

Some of these issues are what I’ve experienced in their last releases as well, so at this time I would probably still switch my primary systems to Debian if something happened to Ubuntu.

Mandriva One gets:

3/5, would be a 4.5 without the driver problems, and a 5 if there was a 64-bit disc.