I started useing Mandrake/Mandrive with v.10.0 Community and have upgraded as each version was released. I feel that Mandriva was premature in the release of the 2006 version. It does boot faster but that's about all, I have not found it to be any faster in overall preformance. I have successfully been able to install Nvidia drivers in every release till I installed 2006.0 and now no matter what trick I try I cannot make it work. I am not running any exotic setup and it has always worked in the past. I read that very few if any are experiencing issues with the PowerPack edition though, makes me wonder what tweaks they have done to the drivers or to the Xserver. At anyrate I do feel that its a poor way to force people to either aquire a boxed set or membership. All in all its a good distro but a little dissapointing as there seemed to be no forward movement. If you install KDE 3.4.2 in a 2005LE box you have a better system, of course this is just my opinion.

mandriva seems to be quite a good os, after having used it for a while and compared it to other systems, its a very attactive sollution.
i just dont agree that its worth a 5 (from the previous review). its a free os and quite a fine one too. simple and strait-foreward instalation and setup. only problam is the lack of recent vga drivers.

With all the "issues" I've ever had with Mandrake/Mandriva I still prefer it to Red Hat/Fedora or SuSE pre and post Novell.

Set up on just about any kind of hardware just works, which is really what a distro should do.

It boots in a flash, relatively speaking, and is highly polished and simply works like it should out of the box, as it were. (In my case out of the torrent.) For a lot of the things I do I just install it and, except for upgrades and updates, forget it.

It simply roars on my dual core AMD box. :-)

It seems, though, that the current version of Xorg doesn't like Nvidea drivers for some reason and Mandriva chose not to roll back to a previous version that did.

The program kat, which is the basis of a desktop search engine, seems to cause all kinds of problems on 32 bit machines and I've removed it on all of them. My 64 bit box doesn't seem as affected unless it's just that kat is monopolizing one core leaving me with the other. Kat it not ready for prime time.

One bother, though rather minor in the scheme of things, is the decision not to include a fair number of server packages with the regular and Silver member versions of the distro. (Roughly equivalent to Power Pak and Power Pak Pro.) It does force one into some playing post install to get things going and, while it's not all that hard it seems to me to be time consuming where I didn't have to spend that kind of time before.

All that taken into account (and more) I'd recommend this to any Linux newbie, windows doubter who says that Linux is to hard to install or Linux veteran.

I have used Damn Small Linux and SuSE in the past but Mandriva is a great OS. It can detect all my USB devices and I can access them easily.

The programs featured in Mandriva (using KDE) are easy to use and great for Windows Users as you can still save under Windows format.

The KDE or GNOME enviroments are easy to get the jist of and all the menu's are easy to understand.

I would mostly recommend this OS for people who want to start using Linux and are migrating from Windows, but also for people who are experianced with Linux.

Besides the installion of new software problem I've been having, this is an all round good OS.

If you are a n00b and want to trylinux to getused to an occasional command line that this distro is for you. You rarely have to use a command line becuase the GUI is so powerful. I had my wireless on my laptop set up in 15 mins.

I've been with Mandriva for a long time, and Mandriva 2006 has been really good. It has some more integration with things like clamav and it's a little faster running. It does have a few bugs here and there. I'm thinking about switching though because the quality of the product is going down as the company is getting more and more oriented with making money in my opinion. Still, this is a good OS, easy to use and learn on.

I've been with Mandriva for a long time, and Mandriva 2006 has been really good. It has some more integration with things like clamav and it's a little faster running. It does have a few bugs here and there. I'm thinking about switching though because the quality of the product is going down as the company is getting more and more oriented with making money in my opinion. Still, this is a good OS, easy to use and learn on.

Have used Mandake/Mandriva since 2000. Have found it to be a stable distro even when in cooker. Will continue to use and recommend it to all those Windoze people who are complaining about cost of windoze programs

i loved mandrake 9.0 and had a fantastic run with it. never upgraded cause i believe in not fixing something that ain't broke..i bought this from a company that specialize in linux distro's and couldn't be happier. some problems but only 3 hrs to rectify them and all works well. bit peeved cause i lost konqueror as a browser(it suffers winflaws problem of going slow. firefox works tho). loved to use konqueror but some concessions are needed. absolutely love kaffiene, its the answer to my wishes.. better than mand 9.0 in some ways.. well like all linux distros it can only get better..(not like winflaws that goes backwards first and never catches up).. comfiguring mandriva did take some thinking as i'm use to the menu being arranged differently but love the change and think i can bible bash more winflaws users with it.he he he.. it took me 7 hrs to fix winflaws xp's problems(i need both and my system is dual boot) amd 64 processor confused winflaws but i haven't looked up enhansing(spelt it wrong hey) linux to recognise the processor yet(may be my next headache who knows)... enjoy mandriva like i plan to!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'v started with Mandrake 8.1 and tried almoust every new version.2006 is the best.Works fine for me from september 2005.No crashes,no restarts.

The installation on my HP nx9110 laptop was very fast and easy. Almost everything were identified right out of the box, except the wireless card which I had to install manually. A small problem with ndiswrapper had me downloading an older version to get to work. Also sometimes it crashes with no apparent reason, but its only a matter of time until I figure it out. Recommended for new people.

I installed mandriva 2006. It can't detect my USB wireless adapter. In fact, it detects it as a scanner! :))

Having moved over to an AMD 64bit I chose to instal Mandriva2006. Overall it is a very good distro but reading the review above and trying it for a few days i dont think it compares to the Suse 10 i'm used to.
I didnt like the way you have to pay to join the "club" for online updates
I didnt like the fact that I never got the otion to name the mount points of my numerous partitions
I especially despised the part that called my partitions "windows c" "windows c2" etc as I dont even have windows on there
I didnt like the fact that it over installed my bootloader and didnt detect the suse instal but I got the impression it was only looking for a windows instal. Suse repair disc managed to find both distros and set a working boot loader.
Suse has Yast where you can add, delete or search for installed packages all at one screen. Mandriva insists on a screen for install, a screen for remove, the same with hardware and network settings.
But i
as i said overall it looked good, seemed secure and was easy to add ndiswrapper.
The only reason i dont reccomend this product is that Suse 10 is better.

I use this distribution on both my server and my laptop. My server runs the x86_64 version and my laptop is a x86 version.

After my install all of components, except my sd card reader, was found and works. The wireless card in my laptop was no problem.

i tested it in allmost all way's. like it so mutch that i went out and purchased the advanced version of this os. the download version did everything i ever wanted it to do execpt one thing. my atheros wlan card was only supported with the purcahsed version. in any other way, i just love this one.

for servers it may not be that intresting cuz it's not that super fast, but with the webmin package every noob can get a large server running in no time.

for desktop use it is just what you need. you can edit allmost every part of it and u dont have to go in console.

even for beginners it just rules