The nice thing about mandriva is the Penguin Liberation Front which is a packaging project dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Linux distributions for various reasons. Basically this means that you have less to configure and can add in all those useful packages that you would normally have to toil over with a repository. Especially in the case of switching from windows I would check out this article which explains how to add some functionality to linux and keep up with productivity. To the issue of speed it absolutely will be faster on a hard drive and i highly recommend making the dive , Also dual booting is not a bad idea as sometimes it might take some work to get fully windows free.

Regards
JKZfixme

That PLF website is looking pretty moldy. I had to brush off some cobwebs when I was browsing it. Is it still alive?

Don't overlook Mepis7 it has very good driver support I got a dell with a nvidia video card it and sound and all my devices worked right off the beginning.

It's not true. It's a myth.

I only a few weeks ago got completely fed up with windoze after years and years of frustration and decided to quit cold turkey and try linux, so I downloaded a Mandriva live cd. Installation was simple, the only issue I've had was the dvd burner not working, but I have it now. I can't say anything about other distros, I've only seen this and Fedora, but Mandriva is pretty easy for a newbie to get used to. Run the live cd and play around for a little bit.

Hello again!

Thank u all for helping me with all explaination!
I installed the mandriva on my hard disk already... I'm enjoying it a lot! I think It's easy to deal with.. Though surely I'm not able to do everything yet.
When I created this topic I said I'm a home user... In fact, I work with my computer and don't know exactly why I wrote that.. maybe because I initially just wanted to try a diferent linux thinking I'd get back to windows frustated once again, I wasn't planning to work with it. Now I'm seeing that it can be quite possible...

jkzfixme, thanks for the article link... I'm gonna take a look on it.
About the dual booting... I haven't erased the NTFS partition with Windows XP installed... Thinking that while booting,it would show me a way of choosing between the systems. Unfortunately that didn't happen.
Once a while when I needed to use some windows aplication today during the day, I used the other machines. I don't know how to share files on Lan nor acessing other machines... Though my computer is conected to them as I'm using a shared Adsl.

Andy... My devices also r working well, even my HP 3 in 1, I just plugged the USB cable and it started downloading drivers automatically...

That's it guys I think this time I won't give up linux anymore
I'll just search the web for information to study and learn more and more about it...
Thanks again for providing me all the above information...
I'll keep using this forum and I enjoyed it a lot

A excellent week.. Bye!

You should have gotten a Grub or Lilo menu giving you the choice to boot XP or Mandriva, assuming you installed Mandriva correctly. If you're sure you didn't hose your XP partition, ask in the Mandriva forum, they can probably help you set that up.

IGF

Try Dynebolic it's excellent, but I dont knwo about your hardware.

I would suggest using Mandriva, I have used it since Mandrake 8. I really like it, more so then every other distro that I have tried, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, and the list goes on. So far I haven't found another distro that is comparable.

Everybody's going to tell you their favourite distro is the best. Try them all, or at least a few, then make your own mind up which you prefer.

Try some distros and pick the one with the best package manager. You can make anything look and feel like anything else, they're all using DE which you could get with any distribution. The only difference (generally, or as far as you're concerned) is the package management. Slackware doesn't automatically resolve dependences, debian based distros have a slow release cycle but very stable software, redhat rpm's are supposed to be a pain, archlinux releases software very quickly etc.

Another vote here for Mandriva. It seems to be the one I always return to after a bout of distro hopping. I've tried 14 of the top 16 on the distrowatch list, plus a few others further down the line.

I've tried Kubuntu plus 3 releases of Ubuntu. I think they are good solid distros, but I dislike them for my own use. I think I mostly don't like the system administration model based on sudo. My gut feeling is that what Canonical and fans think is a security feature is actually an exposure. I don't like to think that an intruder could mess with my system with a normal user password.

*ubuntu people will disagree, and that's ok. One of the best things about using Linux is the choices it gives you. Use what YOU like and not what someone else tells you is the only one that isn't junk.

The purpose of my post isn't to insist that Mandriva is better than everything else. It is simply to help make you feel confident that you haven't made a bad choice.

I currently use Mandriva (2 computers), Debian (my server), and Sabayon (my wife's computer).

I agree with brianL and dickgregory. I didn't mean to say that mandriva is the best for everyone, I just meant to say that out of all the distros that I have tried Mandriva is the best for me. The real way to figure it out is to go and look at a bunch of distros, and see which one you like the best.

It would probably be best for him to stick with Mandriva since he's made it this far. Then in about 6 months or so, we will be hearing him ask, he's ready to try a different distro once he's learned his way around linux more.

As I mention earlier, I recently installed Mandriva and will start really getting into it more this weekend. I haven't even updated it yet. But from what I see, it sure looks nice. Plus I may try to trim some of the fat from KDE apps.