2006.0 is a little buggier than most people expected it to be. I have had problems with the system clock, with kded dying, and with kat.

2006.0 has better 64X2 support, faster booting, and newer of all the packages.

It is impossible to produce any kind of distro without bugs. Generally, I have been very happy for many years with Mandrake/Mandriva, and that hasn't changed.

SuSe is also a good distro, but I see no reason to "jump ship". But I also see no compelling reason to install 2006.0 if you have 10.2 running really well. In fact, I found 10.2 to be a really nice, stable distro (like 9.2 was).

I think Mandriva should go back to releasing isos for everyone at the same time, but offer other perks for the club members. With the way Ubuntu and its derivatives as well as OpenSuse are becoming popular Mandriva can't afford to mess around with this issue of isos or they will lose market share very quickly.

Iam using 2006 powerpack and find it more stable than 2005LE on my hardware. One problem is the KAT software, its very buggy, causes crashes and simple does not seem to work. I have removed it and things are much better.

I was very happy that my ATI 9800 pro graphics card was properly setup, (during install) and Open GL works well, it means that I can play UT2004 with no problems.

What is KAT? Why is it that it causes so many problems?

Kat is a desktop search engine like Google desktop search, don't know why it is so buggy

See, it didnt set my ATI card up right, and I spent hours trying to get the drivers right, so I finally said screw it, and went back to 2005.

Just upgraded and there are no big changes here. I can't confirm the faster boot, for some reason it takes forever now to bring up the ethernet cards. It seems ok, but just a little bit too buggy for my taste. My production machine is still running 10.0. I was going to upgrade this time but will postpone that yet again.

Hey Reddazz

I like your desktop very much - how do you get those stats like that, i mean like CPU usage, memory usage, on the desktop?

Regards
Shelton.

Its so buggy because its still under heavy development and they have not yet released an official stable release.

I installed Mandriva 2006 on Saturday. I use the GNOME desktop. I was using Mandriva 2005 prior to this.

Here are my observations thus far:

Pros:

• I am sure that everyone can agree that the graphics are improved.
• GNOME volume control is now customizable.

Neutral:

• The bootloader, bootsplash, login screen, GNOME splash screen, and default desktop wallpaper all have the word Free sprawled diagonally across the screen. I am guessing that if you pay for the distribution, this disappears.
• The window selector list is present by default.
• By default, you now get Download, Music, Pictures, and Video folders in your home directory.
• The default screensaver has some new cycling graphics of a penguin.
• Slight changes in the system menus, but the application hierarchy works in the same way so you still get deep menus even if you only have a few applications installed.

Cons:

• I don't see any features from Conectiva or Lycoris. I was hoping for the Synaptic Installer from Conectiva and the Organic Light Photography wallpapers and the desktop menu structure from Lycoris.
• If you are running the free version, you still have to seek out and individually download JAVA, FlashPlayer, RealPlayer, MS Corefonts, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and NVIDIA drivers.
• OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 has crashed three times already.
• The system wide Control Center freezes while installing software from a server, if the server is busy.
• Many bugs are still present.

I had to tweak the initial installl before I got the faster boot times. Strange, as this is supposed to be a feature of this release. After the tweaks boot up was obviously faster. The main one was disabling Bridge in startup services, useful if you are part of a large network, possibly, but not for my little home network. Waiting for the bridge service to start took a long time.

I completely uninstalled Kat. It would use a large portion of cpu cycles every few seconds. Playing RtCW would pause frequently, just the sort of thing you don't wnat in the middle of lining up a shot. I am using an Opteron 146 with 1.5 GB ram and a radeon 9800 pro so it's not that my system was too slow. Kat is not useful to me if it is such a resource hog. I suppose I could have tweaked with nice settings but I don't know how well that would have worked and besides, I'm perfectly happy with slocate.