My Errant Mind

This one will be short and sweet. Mainly because it was a negative experience (not necessarily bad), but also because I don’t want to waste writing effort and time on this distro review when I’m anxious and excited to get busy writing a few other distro reviews.

I will be adding reviews of Debian ‘Etch’, PCLinuxOS MiniMe, and the RailsLive distro soon. I’m excited about two of the three. I may even throw in a review of SUSE SLED 10 (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop), though I am admittedly not friendly with Novell as a result of their Microsoft dealings.

My apologies if this particular review is less than what it ought to be. As I mentioned, I’m anxious to write up a couple of reviews of some distros that have me excited, and so I want to make this quick.

System And Particulars

Check the My Box page for the particulars.

Background

I took Mandriva Free out for a month long spin. That would suggest that I liked it on the one hand—which I did. Overall, while I had high hopes for it, the distro never quite did it for me. Here’s the dish on why…

What I Like About This Distro

Well, there’s no arguing that Mandriva has a lot of good points. Hardware management is a really strong point in all the various Mandriva distros and many of those distros that are forks of Mandrake (what Mandriva was called in a previous life). I was glad that it recognized a variety of different partition (file system) types without a hitch (NTFS, FAT32, ReiserFS, etc.). And, it had no problem with my SanDisk Cruzer Mini USB drive. In fact, it is less of a hassle to use with Mandriva than on Windows.

You can configure and tweak to your heart’s content. That’s a great thing, and much appreciated. This distro also has a slick, well-branded look and feel. It wouldn’t play my DVD’s out of the box however…which is par for course these days.

What I Did Not Like About This Distro

OK, trying to do anything as ‘root’ is a pain in the rear. Why? For one, all windows would open in one place and were immovable. That’s right, immovable. Even maximizing the windows sent them off-screen. I’m sure there is some setting that allows you to change this, but I could not find it, and I looked just about everywhere.

In fact, I changed some settings that I thought would cure the issue, and the settings would not stick. There are still problems lurking within that need to be fixed. Especially if one cannot even create a usable interface in the ‘root’ account. You can do a lot outside of root, don’t get me wrong. But such a major obstacle for new users will certainly send them away.

There were other problems, such as with setting up software repositories. Some were minor inconveniences, others very frustrating. I just could not get Wine working, try as I might, either. That was also disappointing, but wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for me personally. However, for those looking to migrate away from Windows and wanting to try and bring some essentials with them, it could easily be cause to say “forget it.”

Things That Could Be Improved

Usability. Bottom line. It’s almost there, but needs tweaking. The whole lock-down of application windows by default in ‘root’ is just unacceptable. Over the course of a month, it grew from frustrating to maddening. I searched for some simple fix, but found none. I could surely have posted in some friendly forums (and the Mandriva community is quite friendly), but that would defeat my intent which is to find a good, simple to use distro for users wanting to migrate away from Windows that will just plain work out of the box.

Besides, I didn’t feel like signing up for a Mandriva Club account.

Recommended For?

It’s definitely usable for geeks. If you’re slightly techy/geeky and you have time to kill, you will probably get it up and running suitably. For Linux newbies migrating from Windows, I would suggest looking elsewhere.

I could have easily fixed some of the problems I encountered. And, having done some more research, solutions to some other minor issues were found. However, in trying to stick with my goals, I have to imagine what many Windows users will be thinking and feeling as they encounter things that don’t work, lock up, or are produce confusing looking messages that suggests something is broke.

Keep in mind, this was the Mandriva Free distro. Oddly enough, I had previously tried a Mandriva One cd after burning an .iso to disc and—for whatever reason—it gave me less trouble. Less is more sometimes.

The commercial versions should be suitable for former Windows users, however. I myself may breakdown and purchase Mandriva Powerpack+ to put through its paces. But, I think I’m going to wait until the next release for now.