Mandrake Vs Fedora

I have used Fedora since its release with FedoraCore1. I have loved it. Currently I use FedoraCore3 on some different systems and love it. Many say its buggy and has tons of problems since its Red Hat's testing ground but I dont beleive ive ever encountered any problems with it. What type of bugs are there? Just freezing and stuff or what? It did freeze once when i tried to play Unreal Tournament but that might have been due to the drivers. However, I have never really gotten into multimedia on Fedora buit my new workstation I would like to.

The Last time I used Mandrake was 9.1 and liked it for the most part. I am debating over what to use for my new workstation which I will use to type up documents, run wine to run different windows programs, program a little bit, game a bit, and chat on IM service along with listening to music and watching movies.

Im perplexed what to go with Mandrake 10.1 or FedoraCore3? Does Mandrake offer good hardware support, plenty of included packages, and is easy to use with plenty of GUI interfaces? I am just not sure if i should turn away from Fedora due to the possibility of additional bugs than whats expected since its testing ground for red hat and I have never tinkered around with multimedia features and gaming in Fedora.

Any help is aprpeciated? Also does Mandrake have an program to update the packages sort of like the Red Hat Network one in FedoraCore3? Where i launch the GUI interface and it lists the kernel and the packages that can be updated and then can download them and install the? I havent had much success with apt get and yum in the past for updating my packages, does Mandrake have its own program for this?

Also how does MEPIS fair up against Mandrake and Fedora

I use both Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora Core 3. I believe Mandrake has a lot more packages available compared to Fedora Core 3 because of it's contrib rpm repositories. On the other hand I have found Fedora Core to be quite stable and i enjoy using it. maybe you should try both in a dual boot scenario and then make your mind up on which is the best for you.

Im not fond of dual boots idk why they just annoy me... Have you found one to be better for multimedia and workstation? Which oen is easier to operate? What about hardware compatiblity

disclaimer: My experiences of Fedora and Mandrake ares based on the following versions:
Mandrake 10 official and Fedora Core 2.

Package management: Both are pretty similar .rpm distros, but mandrake has urpmi (apt-get clone) while fedora has yum. Urpmi is by far much faster and I never had any problems with it. Once you set your sources correctly, it´s a joy to use. Yum is pretty similar but it´s dog slow compared to urpmi.

--> Mandrake wins

Media support:

Fedora obviously loses this one. If you add the PLF repositories in Mandrake, it´s extremely easy to set up mplayer etc working. And Fedora doesn´t even support mp3 playing out of the box, which Mandrake does.

--> Mandrake wins

Bugs:

I got the impression that Mandrake seemed pretty buggy compared to Fedora Core 2. Some random odd behaviour, but never anything serious in Mandrake though. Fedora Core 2 seemed pretty rock solid though, never found any problems.

ps: note, I started with Mandrake 10 community in which I encountered most of the bugs, and almost all were fixed with upgrading to official.

--> Fedora wins

Community:

Mandrake has PLF, who have a huge amount of packages which can´t be included in the official distribution. Also mandrakeusers.org is a pretty friendly and nice forum.

--> Mandrake wins

Philosophy:

Both are free as in GPL defition, but with Fedora you are pretty much betatesting for the next Redhat enterprise version which isn´t going to be free.

--> Mandrake wins

Both are good userfriendly distros, but in my opinion Mandrake is clearly superior.


PS: I´ve never tried MEPIS, but lots of people seem to love it. You might want to check out Ubuntu (www.ubuntulinux.org) though... It´s pretty similar to MEPIS. Ubuntu is a userfriendly distro which has gnome 2.8, debian based, professional and 2.6 kernel based. I´d highly recommend Ubuntu over both Mandrake and Fedora.

I personally prefer RPMs over DEBs and havent heard much about Ubuntu but I will look into it... any comments are still welcome. I think im leaning towards Mandrake for this workstation... So is urpmi pretty reliable?

I know KDE is the default for Mandrake but I imagine you can also intall GNOME packages off the CD as well?

Ubuntu lacks multimedia support also I see.....

Just wanted to put in that Mandrake's package management is far superior to Fedora's. I picked Mandrake mainly because of that.

how is Mandrakes management package superior?

All these, Mandrake/FC and Mephis are unimpressive .. I have tried them all three.

Mandrake IS NOT FREE .. to use their update service you have to contribute ($5/month) FC is at least free.
Bill gates at least give you a life time of upgrade on his window .. Mandrake DOES NOT. Yes they appear to have a slightly
better package manager .. but that beauty is only skin deep :-))

So I can't see how mandrake wins this. ... In this regard Suse is better,

FC is also terribly slow compared to almost any other decent distro
Mepis is debian based and poorer in packaging its source.

In short I played with all of them, only kept Suse ..

Slack could be interesting, but I haven't got the courage to try a generation behind kernel any more ... if I want "very stable"
I can always go back to woody.

Im going with Fedora as I have had no troubles at all with it.

Don't post information that you don't really know. Mandrake does not charge to upgrade your system and you can download their iso's for free. Those who are in the Mandrake Club, get preferential treatment and i believe they deserve it because they are paying for the extra services.

Mandrake updates are free! So are those from Fedora. To answer the original poster's question, you'll find much good hardware support and software in both distros. I'd highly suggest trying them both out and finding which one works for you. Both are good, solid distros.

Redazz .. fill me in with the URL for the free upgrades.
I tried it can't find it . I agree Mandrake community is free .. official you can't find it free anywhere and the one that I did find seems like mislabeld by someone .. it's really community edition.

The policy of free community is using folks as testers .. no problem here, but official is only available from the "club".

You can only access the URL if you are a club member and their site doesn't offer the membership for free.

May be I am missing something here so please post the "free URL" for upgrade. Please note that not everyone can pay $5/month
to join, it may be small amount for some and not so small for others.