How many distro's did you try before you settled on Mandrake?

I have tried about 7 so far and keep coming back to Drake and Fedora. I amd dual booting them now until Mandy10 and Fedora core2 come out.

Just curious.

only one

been in Linux just about a week

tried red hat, suse, and then I found mandrake and have not found a reason to try another one yet.

Fedora which wouldn't boot then mandrake and I'm happy.

My first foray into Linux was late 1999 with Red Hat 5.1, a retail copy I bought at a local computer store. Transitioning from NT 4.0 to W2K kept me busy for the next couple years, but I snuck Peanut Linux on a couple of my work computers, since it can be installed on an MS filesystem without repartitioning. Anyway, I've tried most of them at this point and really only moved to Mandrake after Red Hat declared Linux wasn't ready for the desktop and they were focusing on corporate servers. IMHO, BSD makes a much better server platform and I'm really only interested in Linux as a Windows desktop replacement. Being already accustomed to RPMs, Mandy was a logical choice, though SuSE is somewhat appealing now that Novell owns it. Then again, I might take the plunge into Debian instead one day -- knoppix does a pretty good job of detecting all my hardware anyway. The only two I really didn't like were Slackware and Gentoo... though I'm sure others will flame me for that opinion.

I started with several versions of Red Hat which could not convince me to switch from Windows though. My ambitions towards Linux rose again with the release of SuSE 9, which looked promising for a while, but the lack of precompiled rpms combined with little enthusiasm to compile stuff on my side, made me look for a distro with easie package management. Then there was Debian SID for some weeks, providing lots of experience but not much ease of use, especially when it came to completly new installs. Around that time, Mandrake 9.2 came out and here I am, with a system easy to (re-)setup, urpmi and the PLF.

Attempted to use Mandrake as my first distro (Linux for Windows-Mandrake 6.5). My i810 video chipset was not supported. I could look at my Linux installation but the screen was washed out and 4 times the size it should be. Suse 6.4 included i810 support out of the box, so it was really my first working distro.
I moved from Suse to Mandrake 7.1 (did LFS from this) and then Mandrake 8.0 (for over a year).
I picked up on Debian Woody when it first came out and have used it a lot on a number of PCs.
I have been interested in Suse again and tried an FTP install of 9.0
Mandrake is a very nice distro.

This is my fist and it's not going so well...

That's what this forum is for.

I started with a few RH versions which I liked, but then they decided to stop support RH9 which was only out for 10 months....shady.... but ok I will try Fedora RC2, which was a huge mistake that I dont even want to get into.

hmmm ok lets try mandrake 9.2:
first attempt, nuked my CD-ROM.... okay, now Im pi$$ed. That was an easy fix so I will try one more time before I turn my Mandrake CD into a frisbee.
Second attempt, everything went right in and works well. I think the networking support is terrible and it keeps getting worse with Drakgw and drakfirewall but other than that Im happy... although its only been 2 days but so far so good.

I started with Mandrake before I started using Laptops and it was fine. I then swapped to SUSE as that is what some of our corporate servers have been using and it's convenient to have a similar OS on your own computer at home. I found it more difficult initially than Mandrake but fine once you got used to it and it actually WORKED on my first laptop where Mandrake just gave up.

I finally abandoned Mandrake about 3 releases ago as not only was it not Laptop Friendly -- it was "Laptop downright agressive" although I still just try the latest release out just to see what's new.

With modern computers the whole install shouldn't take more than 30 mins anyway so it's not too much of a waste of time to try them -- and the latest screen shots of Mandrake 10 looked good -- including the fonts.

-- A pity that I can't use it really as it's a great distro for the desktop -- but I'm going more and more over to laptops now they have large screens, fast CPU's and can have HUGE external USB2 (bootable) hard disks.

I'm afraid the problems with the last 3 releases of Mandrake on various Laptops I've tried have made me give up on this distro for now.

1) Any PCMCIA card caused the laptop to hang -- now I can forgive the Wifi problems as Wifi is still "iffy" on laptops -- but "standard" PCMCIA / Cardbus cards should work -- No way could I get a Token ring card to work -- necessary for networking to our IBM mainframe.

If a card was present system would hang on boot. Same with an external ethernet card. -- Most computers have a Lan card now built in -- but you still get computer hangs if you insert something like a CF card / microdrive ( 256 - MB - 4GB) where you can unload for example your photos to,

2) Sound / multimedia never worked properly on some laptops -- garbled sound and DVD / TV applications didn't work.

3) Printing sometimes didn't work -- although Cups seems to work now on most distros. Fonts were also horrible -- better now of course.

4) Latest release now won't even boot on INSTALLING the system -- hangs with hda interrupt problems (posted already earlier on this forum).

SUSE is not without its problems -- I still have a niggardly glitch with a 1400 X 1050 Screen but all the multi-media inc 2 DVD players work. but at least the system is stable and provided I stay in the X-Server it's more than adeqate for daily reliable work.

The Mandrake distro looks the slickest and probably would be fantastic if it would run on laptops without too much fuss -- but my experience tends to be leave it well alone until possibly release 12 or 13.

I don't like the idea of Fedora myself -- Redhat seems intent on making itself the M$ of the Linux world -- they aren't really interested in private users anymore and will pull the plug on Fedora as soon as some corporate bean counters start worrying about the share price. I'm sure you'll see that it's only a 9 days wonder.

Well, add one more to my initial list. I am now using Mandrake 10 RC1. I installed it this morning and am hapy with it.

My Father in law had an old laptop laying around his office and I found it last week. Its an old Compaq Presario that was running Windows 95. It has a 2g hd and 96M ram. He basically said "take it" and I have been trying various distro's on it this week. The only one I have been able to install successfully on it was Slackware 9.0. It seems a good fit for the old boy and am glad to see it breathing again.

I' think I'll give it back to him with Slack and see what he thinks. I need to make it "idiot proof" first though so I'll probably set him up a user name and some basic permissions, a few good office apps and games and be done with it. Hopefully we'll have another convert.

Altlinux Junior 2.2, Redhat 9, Suse 9 and now mandrake 9.2, but I think that I'll change too Slackware 9.1

I have been running MDK 10.0 since it was in beta on my laptop. So far everything works just fine. You might give 10 a try.

I tried 10.0 RC1 on a Sony VAIO --- Couldn't get much past the initial screen -- kept getting Lost Interrupt hda

didn't make any difference to any parameters I gave the boot program -- and the Laptop BIOS doesn't have an option to turn off DMA so that's not the answer (even though I tried No DMA stuff as parameters)

The few lines of console I saw before it hanged were that hda was DMA enabled whater I did.


Bad one Mandrake -- Distro and screen shots looked good but for some laptops if this is not fixed -- disaster.