I'm not really completely new to linux. I've used Mandrake 9 and 10 with KDE for a while and I absolutely loved them. I had to give it up and go with only 98se for about a year because my computer was just too old to run Mandrake at a decent speed. I'm getting a new system with an AMD64 FX-53 processor, nvidia 6800 ultra, and 1024 mb RAM. I want to dual boot Linux and XP.

I'm really wanting to go with Mandrake and KDE again. It's really well layed out, easy to install and use, and comes with a nice basic software package. There's just one thing holding me back... Even though I can run rings around a Mac or Windows based machine, the package manager on Madrake had me almost in tears. I only managed to get one program installed without some sort of missing lib or lib conflict. It was awful. And I was well humbled when I tried to compile the source myself.

What I'm really wondering is if there is a distro that has easier application management? And if not is there a program other than the standard KDE/Mandrake package manager that makes it easier to install programs?

Thanks

I don't use Mandrake myself, but from what I hear its package management system called urpmi is considered one of the better and easier ones around. Did you use urpmi in your earlier attempts? I think it needs to be configured first, but otherwise, you should have no problems with it.

That could be one of my problems. It's been awhile so I don't remeber exactly how it was setup, but I did use uprmi. I don't remember configuring it. It could have also been the software. I'm a graphic artist and alot of the vector drawing and desktop publishing software was not as mainstream as the other linux programs and most were still in beta when I was trying to install them. I had no problems with Gimp and Open Office. (Of course if I remember correctly they're both included in 10.1.)

Well, urpmi cannot help you with packages it doesn't know about. But that is true for any package management system So perhaps your real question is not 'which distro has the best management system', but rather, 'which distro has the biggest/most up to date selection of packages'? In which case, the answer would be: Gentoo, Mandrake, Fedora - These three are the biggest and more or less equal. There is also Debian which also has a huge selection, but it can be a little less cutting edge, even with unstable version.... though some Debian users might disagree with me there.

Thanks. I think I'll stick with Mandrake. I'm sure the rpm thing's not that difficult to figure out once I put my mind to it.