Hi,
I've been wondering which of the current distributions still has the most code left remaining in it from the original Mandrake distro from the 1990's: openMandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, or what? Ultimately I was wondering which distro currently behaves the most like the old Mandrake distro...

I can't speak to the "most Mandrake-like" distro because it's been almost two decades since I last used Mandrake, but I can say that I've found Mageia to be a stable and reliable distro. I've been running it on one machine or other since v. 3 and have come to quite like it.

I might conclude maybe none but I do not know what you mean by behaves like? Just from the basics both Mageia and OpenMandriva use systemd so they are out. PclinuxOS is an independent distribution that does not use systemd and if combined with KDE could be quite similar to Mandrake. It is also RPM based so again fairly close but without urpmi. Since then with 2.6+ kernels and libsata no /dev/hdx, no fixed /dev devices i.e everything is dynamic.

I do not know the fundamental difference between a systemd and non-systemd system is, so if you could explain, that would be greatly appreciated.

The old Mandrake used SySV init system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Init

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

what do you mean by "behaves the most like the old Mandrake distro".
It has similar GUI, or what?

Re: Post #1:

I had Mandrake for a bit back then, and they were repackaging Red Hat, with tweaking. Then they went broke.

I would say that all linux distros have the same basic software, but the individual tweaks that Mandrake applied, which were not that great anyhow, are gone, lost in the ether. Software suites have gone, and more importantly, many others have come. Mandrake had to deal with ISA buses, and PCIE was unheard of.

Forget Mandrake. If you're hankering after that feel as I remember it, try Antix (If you don't want systemd) or Linux Mint if you prefer it. They both work better than Mandrake ever did (that I remember). If you need rpms and not debs, try opensuse. And that's from a Slackware user! You don't sound ready to promote yourself to Slackware yet.

Maybe 'behave' was a wrong choice of words. Perhaps 'features' might have been a better choice I suppose...

ok, in that case what features are important for you? What are you looking for?

Probably PCLinuxOS. It still uses a lot of the same tools and methodologies that Mandrake did, stuff like SysVinit and apt-rpm, and the Control Center still looks like Mandriva. But as far as "original code" retained back that many years, there's not going to be much in any of the successor distros. If I had to guess, Mageia might have the most because it was directly forked off Mandriva in 2010, while OpenMandriva was a 2012 fork of ROSA after it had forked Mandriva. PCLOS was forked off the Mandriva base for the last time in 2007 and has been independent ever since.

As an ex-Mandrake user & crash-tester, I don't remember many stand out features that needed preserving. There was one, a python script called 'xstart.' The background was that I was looking at various useless window managers, of which there were plenty, and my kids got mightily fed up and demanded to know why I was 'continually farting about with half-assed window managers.' They wanted kde.

I put this to the crash-test support guy, and got a middle finger. So I copied & pasted their glowing promises of support to the thread, and the guy wrote xtart to shut me up. Can you be more explicit and mention others?