Does anyone else think Mandrake is a bloated distribution? I have heard that, but I don't have the experience to determine if it's true.

No, not anymore than any other of the desktop oriented distros, especially since Mandrake compiles for i586 whereas fedora (and suse too I think) only compile for i386.

The person who told you probably just doesn't like Mandrake..

Why don't you just download and try it then.

If by bloated you mean slow then really the only way to get a faster distro would be with one of the do-it-yourself distros like Gentoo or LFS. If by bloated you mean 'it installs too much stuff by default' then just untick what you don't want during the install.

The individual who called it "bloated" didn't elaborate, so I am guessing he meant it installs too many applications and/or uses too much HD space. I am considering going back to Mandrake, because I have been using Xandros but am highly dissatisfied with it. I only dumped Mandrake because I couldn't get some things to work properly (mostly Ndiswrapper, which I figured out later) and, since I didn't know better, blamed it on the Mandrake distribution. My only Mandrake-specific complaint amounts to a quibble: I didn't like the "dragon" in the shutdown box (no more than I liked the obnoxious animated dog in the Windows "Find" box) and wanted to get rid of it.

That's a KDE thing. If the Xandros people had removed it I'm sure its a fairly easy customisation to remove it in Mandrake too.

Well, I'd say that Mandriva is bloated compared to SOME of the other distros out there. I mean, Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and maybe even Linspire are all very desktop oriented distros that only come on one CD. Mandriva is 3. However, having more CDs isn't all that bad, you just don't do a full install. Then if you need some of the packages later, you don't need to download them. If you don't need them it doesn't hurt you because it isn't on your harddrive.

Mandriva is definitely NOT bloated compared to the other two of the big 3 distros. A full fedora 2 install was something like 12-14 gigs if I remember right and I think that Suse is up to about NINE CDs. Now that's overkill. For a desktop distro, it's amazing how much Mepis gets into their one CD though. They have built in support for the official nVidia drivers. They have java run time environment, flash, mp3 codecs, and Adobe reader for multimedia and web browsing. Each one of those is usually a small pain to install in Linux. The also have much more up to date software available due to being based on debian packages. If you just want a desktop pc, I have to recommend Mepis due to the ease of use. However, if you want to do more than that... set up some workstation or server applications, the extra packages in Mandriva are really nice.

Mandrake has way more than 3 CDs worth of software. If you goto easyurpmi and setup your repositories (for free - you don't need club membership) you get more than 2 DVDs worth of software, you get about 1 DVD worth of software when you buy a powerpack or have a club membership. I did a fairly full install of the DVD (in that I ticked all the package groups except for 'Other Window Managers') and its around 3.7GB. Anyway it really doesn't matter how much software is available for your distro, the more the better, but how much you select to install during the installation.

Springshades: Yeah, I can see what you are saying about Fedora, because I haven't tried it, but it's the distro that comes with the book "Linux for Dummies," and I noticed that it is a DVD.

I noticed someone made this remark about Mandrake / Mandriva recently in the general forum and the ensuing comments made by a certain 14 yr old were really quite ignorant.

I'll repeat here what I said there ...
You can install as little or as much as you like with M/M.
You can many or few services running as you like with M/M.
and the same applies to most distros !

It comes down you your preferences when setting up your distro so dont get hung up with "my distro is better than yours" comments. The beauty of most linux distros is that you can almost infinately customize them to suit your tastes.

floppy

The fedora DVD is only around 2.6GB for FC4 - its just 4 CDs worth of software put together. Anyway Fedora has a lot of repositories that you add too (rpmforge, livna, freshrpms, etc etc.) which greatly increase the number of packages available. Really saying a Linux distro is 'bloated' based on the amount of CDs or DVDs it comes on is a bit silly.

It's worth noting that you can do custom installs with Mandriva - if you know what you're doing you can quite comfortably strip the distro down on install to around 500-600 mb and still have a useable desktop - ie one that's centred around, IceWM, Eterm, Firefox, XChat etc etc...... quite minimal - further, from that starting point, it's straightforward to set your sources up and add to your existing setup with URPMI if you wish.

Don't get me wrong. I like Mandrake and it is the distro which I think is the easiest to install.
Apart from that, issues can arise when you need/want to upgrade to a newer version. Sometimes
it is flawless, sometimes it leaves you with an unusable desktop. There are some 'customizations' that
I dislike, such as their handling of KDE. But when you begin, it is nice to see everything almost completely
configured such as printers, Logitech mice (ALL the buttons functionning) and things like that.

cheers

Oh, and I don't think its 'bloated'. And it runs as fast as any of the big distros.

Well, being a MDK user I have to say I really like the distro... I have used many and I think MDK and SLACK are the best out there...

These are only opinions based on my exp and hardware... The only way to really find out if a distro is good for you is to install it and see how you like it and how it performs...

I don't like a lot of the automated mount stuff with MDK but it can be disabled, however, the urpmi database has worked well and I have had no problems with it as yet...

I would certainly recommend it... Try it... If it feels bloated, delete it... It's really that easy...

KC

Oh yeah, I didn't comment on things such as system resources, and that seems much more important when considering a distro. I'm going to give the example of the standard install, because if you are fairly new then you'll either be doing a standard install or something very close to it. I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to be too customized unless you are more of an intermediate or expert user.

From what I've seen, the draw on system resources in a standard installation of mandrake are almost exactly the same as Windows XP. At least that's what I've seen in my computers. If you do a standard installation except add the installation of the Gnome desktop and then boot into Gnome, you'll run with a bit less of a demand on resources. Standard Suse install tends to use up a bit more resources than Windows XP and Fedora Core is a bit less (this makes sense because FC uses Gnome desktop by default). Xandros uses a bit more resources than XP, Mepis is about the same as XP.

These are all mostly based on opinion and looking at the draw on resources in various monitoring tools. I'm using Windows XP as a baseline because it is unrelated to any of the distros... I guess that makes it a somewhat unbiased comparison. I almost always do an initial check on resources when I install a distro. This also only takes into account things like background services, if I were to include things like applications stuff would just get too complicated. I'd get into things like the fact that while Xandros and Mepis appear to take just as much of a draw on resources, much of the usage is due to things like preloading Open Office, so they are very removable. The usage is normally due to extra services and such things in the less targeted distros. (I'd consider Xandros and Mepis to be targeted at the new desktop user and Fedora Core, Suse, and Mandrake to be less targeted, more towards general usage.)

I think that Mandriva is a really great distro to try out. It's one of my favorites. However, if you do try it, make sure to add the thac rpm package source or else your software will be pretty far out of date. (i.e. I think Firefox is still at 1.0.2, there are major security problems in the older editions of Firefox, and they won't even let you download themes at their website unless you have a more current edition. The thac source will keep you up to date on many popular software programs, but I don't think it's as well known as some of the other sources.)

Umm.. no. Mandriva backports security fixes into their Firefox 1.0.2 RPM, so assuming you've run MandrakeUpdate recently you will have what is effectively Firefox 1.0.6. It even sends its User Agent string with 'firefox 1.0.6' I believe once you've updated it. They don't backport new features though, if there have been any between 1.0.2 and 1.0.6.

Probably because it tends to break things. Thac tries to make RPMs for the latest and greatest of things, and with KDE especially this can be a major upgrade. Look at the threads on this forum and in the MandrakeClub forum (you don't need membership to browse it) about upgrading to KDE 3.4. You should only add Thac's as a source if you're prepared to go through some difficulties and risk breaking your KDE installation to get the latest version of KDE.

Springshades: I don't know much about Linux resource use, but I just left Xandros, and it was terribly slow. The Xandros File Manager took five seconds to run...horrible. I can see that Mandrake is obviously faster.