After experimenting with Red hat, SUSE, and Mandrake since even before Red Hat 5.1, Mandrake 9.1 is the first linux I feel comfortable enough with to all but completely dump Windoze. I now do some 95% of my work in Mandrake 9.1. Unfortunately my wife and child do not want to change, so I am forced to use Samba to network with them on our LAN - but even that turned out to be simple enough for me to figure out.

Installing is incredibly quick and painless. I had Mandrake 9.1 installed with all kinds of extra stuff like openoffice.org, multimedia apps, apache web server, etc. in less time than it takes to just install bare-bones XP OS.
Putting all the applications in XP that just come with Mandrake would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and take many hours to install!

Perhaps the thing that amazed me the most was CUPS automated setup of my LAN and local printers - they were just pretty much all there with little to no intervention. My Epson USB scanner was pretty much automatically installed as well.

Of course as with all linuxes not everything came up roses - my ATI RADEON AIW 7500 simply would not work in X, so I pulled it and put in an nvidia GEforce 4 and never had another problem with X again. Normally I would have tried to work around this - but I had had it with ATI problems and was ready for a change - I understand this card SHOULD work but I will not give it a second chance after seeing what nvidia can do in linux!

Also, things like CD burning, smartmedia readers, mp3 players can take a bit or a lot of fiddling and searching for how-to's to get working, especially for a true linux newbie. And some things like my digital voice recorder and on-the fly UDF packet writing to CDRW is just not available at all (yet).

Some things are just plain broken like KSCD which for some reason just don't like me and won't do a successful CDDB read and then won't ever start up again after I shut it down or Mandrake Control Center, which, while I realize it is one of the best things about Mandrake, sometimes lies about configuring your hardware; like when I switched from a built-in via-rhine to a 8139too ethernet card and the Network Wizzard kept reassuring me that it had saved the new configuration, only to have eth0 fail on the next boot up until I finally edited /etc/modules.conf manually and changed it!

Bottom line:
Mandrake is relatively painless to install, and gives you much more bang for the buck than any other OS I know of (except possibly SUSE). But expect to spend more time configuring certain peripherals than in Windoze, once installed, and maybe have a couple things not ever work. A small price to pay in my book to dump M$ an their spyware/virus nightmare OS.

I was looking for a Linux distro to quickly set up a firewall. Some recommended Slackware but I didn't feel savvy enough to config it straight from command line. I have a working knowledge of Linux but I still use X to do the basic configuration. I then tweak it from command line. I found the expansive library of drivers and utilities included in Mandrake very helpful. On my IWill motherboard everything was onboard and I was afraid the drivers would be hard to find for Linux. I was pleasantly suprised that not only did Mandrake have all of the drivers, it cofigured all of it for me. I liked it so much I put it on my home system. I have XP on the other drive and have yet to boot to it since the install. I have everything I need here. I could even use remote desktop to manage all of my client's Win2000 Servers from Mandrake.

Being a hard-core programmer I find certain things inexcusable. The software installer, "rpmdrake", which comes with this distribution is one of the most unfriendly pieces of code I have met since I first encountered DOS. In no particular order: (a) It would say to load such-and-such a CD but then refuse to rcognize said CD. (b) It needs to have an install CD in the drive when run under Linux, but it doesn't tell you that; it just sits. (c) Upon doing an "upgrade" it wiped out the existing installation. (d) You click on load-this-category but it only loads parts of that category. (e) It has no simple way to install everything. (f) It was unable to load some packages because it couldn't find files. Isn't that what dependency checking is for? (g) instaling even a few packages means you are constantly swapping CDs. (h) To avoid doing constant CD swapping you try to load a bunch of stuff, spending a long time reading descriptions which frequently tell you nothing about what the code in the package does. And then, ONLY at the very end, does it tell you there is a conflict, voiding the whole install with no way to recover, a pure waste of time. If the tool which does the installation is one of the key measures of the quality of a distribution, then this is a POOR distribution. Now I understand why Mandrake is on the edge of bankruptcy.

I think that Mandrake is the future of where Linux wants to go. Its got a great looking interface with many many programs that all work wonderfully. I would recommend this product to anyone and evryone who truly wants a great computing experience

A brilliant distro I think, I would have changed some things on the default though, such as more themes for KDE (such as new styles, window decoprations etc). By default the KDE look is ok but I found it far too cluttered and intimidating by default, so I would have toned it down slightly or at least had the option to.

Only *real* moans i would have are probably due to KDE itself and not mandrake. For instance, KDE seems to have a new bug or error each day, whether it be broke shortcuts, randomly appearing menu items, or some little bugs in apps (KMail for one, i cant change my account name!)

On the whole (as far as ive seen from linux) its a good distro, the mandrake control centre is good and very fast compared to some other control centres ive seen (SuSE for one).

Last note..i would have added more help, this might annoy advanced users but is welcomed by newbies like me! if there is help it doesnt really tell me what i want to know, it tells me how to use linux as an end-user (which may be what a lot of people want, but myself i want to understand _why_ things are how they are, not just know that is how it is)

Apart from my small grumbles, a good distro! its survived longer than older redhat's and suse's ever have, i think this is the first distro ive ever seen viable to use as an everyday o/s for a newbie like me!

Hmm... I didn't really like mandrake. It had a nice installer, but the other problems make me unable to recommend this product. It got slow after leaving it on for a few days. I have never had this problem with any other distro. The Drake control/update program crashed on me and the update downloading was broken. I also had problems with mandrake specific rpms not being able to install due to dependency problems. I can't really blame them for rpms defficiencies though. There are better choices.

Easy to install, configure, and play with. If you want to go really deep with it, though, it provides the tools you need for it. URPMI works great, and everything you could want is on the Mandrake CD's. I'll bet there's even more when you buy the CD set. However, if you want to get the most out of it, you have to do that on your own. That's not hard, though. Can't wait until we hit Mandrake 10 :D.

Mandrake 9.1 was my first foray into the Linux world. I first cut my teeth in the good old days of DOS and am something of a Windows power user but Mandrake was my first for Linux. With all the talk I had heard of how difficult it was to get a Linux system up and running with every peice of hardware working I thought I would have a fight ahead of me.

I was pleasently suprised. The installation was slick, and as painless as a windows install. Actually, in some respects it was more painless. Hardware detection was simple and straight forward. Soon as my system booted up I could get on the internet. It found my LAN printer without any hassle.

Mandrake 9.1 has done much for bringing Linux closer to the average user. If all the good things that happened to me were the end of the story, I could say that Mandrake Linux is ready to replace windows for the general market.

But I did have problems. My ISA sound card required some configuration. It was not difficult for me, but would have been scary for someone who has never seen a command prompt before in their lives. Also, I have a minor display problem which is more irritating than truly inhibiting of functionality. A few other minor troubles and frustrations haven't detracted from my own enjoyment of this distros ease of use, but they have reminded me that even something so good as Mandrake 9.1 still isn't ready for the wide world where everyone needs to have their hand held for the smallest system modification.

I'm not a newbie but I like easy to use interfaces, and mandrake has always been good at this. Very easy installation interface, and post-install configuration tools. You mantain traditional command line tools for configuration options but also have visual interfaces to configurate almost anything (X, mount points, lilo, hardware, etc.)
Inludes software for almost anything (several X desktops & window managers, graphics, sound, video, office suites, development tools and IDE, lots of games, text editors, borwsers and networking tools, chat, ftp clients)
Mounts NTFS readonly and FAT/FAT32 in read/write mode, seamless during installation.
Works over rpm format, making it almost fully compatible with redhat and redhat-compliant third-party software packages (opera web browser, yahoo messenger, vmware, real player, rpm-find downloads). Worth to mention the graphic user interface to visually install/uninstall rpm packages: simply great.
Finally, great look and feel, both in kde and gnome.

It's the easiest and best disto I have tried.
I have been experimenting with Linux since Redhat 6.0 until 9.0, all of them were absolute nightmares to get up and going, with Mandrake it was all a breeze, put the cd in booted off it and followed the prompts, 20 min later I had a full install done, and everything was working. Plugged my usb mem stick in and it was recognised.
Up-dates are also not a problem, except for the first XFree86 one which had a glitch in.
For the rest I have never had any problems.

I will continue with Mandrake, I will not bother with any other distro

A great distro to have as my first. I was amazed when KDE loaded and I got the startup sound straight after the install.
Network & internet was available immediatedly after install too. And it even had my Windows partitions loaded and available immediatedly.
If you don't want to play around with config files and kernel compiling this is definatedly a distro to consider. However when things go bad It's difficult to know where to begin to fix them. Such as when my printer decided It wasn't going to listen to Linux any more and I lost printing. I didn't know how the system was configured so had no idea on how to fix it (plus im a newbie :))
Also there are many things customized for mandrake so you can load a lot of the customizations if you recompile things.
But overall a great distro to learn from!