I've been using Mandrake since version 9.1.

When I found out about all of the errors and bugs in 9.2 (Killing CD-Rom drives scares me) I switched to Fedora since it has a Redhat background, which is what I started with.

I'm considering a move back to MDK, but I need to know a few things first.

1. Is it as fast as Fedora? Fedora made efforts to speed up their OS and it shows. 9.1 loaded very slowly for me.

2. Did they get rid of all of those bugs? If so, where are the updated ISO's at?

3. What all is different in the download edition and the retail edition as far as ads and watermarks? Is it watermarked? (I couldn't help but notice "download edition" on the wallpaper of a recent screenshot). Please don't send me a link because I read them and I still don't really get it, I'd rather know from someone that has used 9.2 for some time.

Any answers to these questions will be greatly appreciated!

1. For a comparison, no idea. Haven't used Fedora. But I have found 9.2 to be faster then 9.1 on the same hardware.

2. I'm not sure about updated isos. But for what its worth, I NEVER had a bug, after installs on 4 desktops and 1 laptops with both the download and powerpack editions (I downloaded first, then bought the PP). I'm not suggesting that the bug reports aren't true, but you are much more likely to hear about when something doesn't work, then if it works flawlessly. I'm certainly the latter.

3. My Powerpack had the watermark removed, but still had many pre-existing bookmarks in Konqueror and Mozilla. To that I thought... who gives a whoot. Seriously. I took note of which products and services where supporting Mandrake, then moved all the bookmarks into a folder called "MandrakeStuff" and haven't looked at them since. I could have deleted them, but I wanted them there for reference. I believe in supporting those who support me.

I think you'll be pretty happy with either version. Truthfully, you can always just take the watermark out yourself and delete the bookmarks. That said, if you enjoy Mandrake, then why not purchase it?

jlacroix,

I agree with bigVoice, MDK9.2 is faster than MDK9.1. I will even say that MDK9.2 is considerably faster than RedHat 9.0. On my machine, RedHat 9.0 was killing me. It was excruciatingly slow.

I did have some problems with the menu system, the RPM system and the screensavers. I went to Mandrake Update and found that there were upgrades that covered these issues. I downloaded and installed, and been very happy since. (This was my first use of Mandrake Update. I have a 56k modem that only connects at 24k, so the downloads took approximately 4 hours, or so.) If you have access to a faster connection, download the RPMs and install them yourself.

The default "watermark" wallpaper doesn't bother me, since my account wallpapers are not the default.

I bought the MDK 9.2 powerpack edition and it was running pretty fast. I then found the multimedia kernel on one of the CDs and installed it. MDK it rockin and rollin....



9.2 is sweet.

P.S. Linux is only killing a certain type of drive and the problem is with the drive's firmware, not Linux.

I might try Mandrake, but I put alot of money into this computer and I'm kinda scared to ruin my drives since I have no money to replace them if anything goes wrong.

What brand of cd do you have? The mdk website has a list of problem drives (mainly LG).

I don't know. I think my burner is a TEAC, my DVD drive I have no idea.

In the Control Centre, there should be an option for viewing hardware. Take a look in there, then go to www.mandrake.com and I think on the first page (news) there is a list of problem drives.

actually, it's here.