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dont know how ctkroeker's post would help but i would say ubuntu is better then mandriva, i never had a good expirence with the latter but with ubuntu i enjoyed it for a long time but finally ditched it because of speed problems with xfce4 and fluxbox, but apart from that great distro and its so damn easy to set up.
I personally have never liked mandrake at all, nothing against it i suppose, just the look and feel, why bother. however I have used Ubuntu and got pretty good vibes from it, the machine i was using however was too slow so it got FreeBSD instead. Hadta try it.
Mandrake is built on RedHat, while Ubuntu is built on Debian. Not much separates these two distros - but here are some things worth considering:
Mandrake uses RPMs while Ubuntu uses DEBs for installing programs. However, Mandrake has a nice integrated installer that automatically installs programs for you from the control centre, so your RPM experience with Mandrake is little, if not non-existant. Mandrake comes bundled with hundreds of software, hence the download is huge. Ubuntu is only on one CD, leaving you to download and install packages yourself.
Both distros are freely downloadable, but Ubuntu offers everything for free, while Mandrake offers a better version of their distros at a price.
Mandrake is friendly for people who have just started entering the world of Linux. I used to use Windows, but my first version of Linux was Mandrake and I learnt a lot from it.
Mandrake has a user-friendly installer, so you can't really go wrong in setup (unless you haven't touched a computer before, but even that is debatable) but Ubuntu has a text-only installer, making it harder for people who have never installed Linux before.
In the end, the distro you choose is really down to your preference. If it works for you, it's good, I guess.
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