I'm considering switching from Fedora to Mandrake simply because I have spent countless hours trying to get 3D hardware acceleration to work on Fedora with no avail.

Do you think I'll have an easier time with Mandrake?

If so, which version should I download? I'm using a Laptop with an ATI Radeon 9000 IGP card.

What do you think?

Mandrake 10 works fine for me utilizing the stock ATI drivers in XFree86.

However I see a slew of posts here from people having problems with the ATI drivers freezing under 10.1's Xorg.

This problem seems not to be so distro bound, rather driver related.

I suppose I'm probably out of luck with this situation then.

I should never has purchased a Laptop with a ATI card. Incredibly frustrating.

You may want to try 10.0 instead which uses XFree86.

The ATI drivers do not seem to have AS MUCH of a problem with XFree86.

I'm running a laptop with Mandrake 10 using a 2.6 kernel and the ATI M6 w/o any freezing.

Of note is that when I originally installed 9.2 with the 2.4 kernel it would freeze all the time unless the nolapic and nopcmcia arguement were given to the kernel.

With 2.6 I have everything turned on.

Note however that the IGP card uses the anemic shared video memory scheme and 3D performance is not great.

Such are the tradeoffs with laptop displays.

I'm using the ATI drivers with 10.1.

Are you using the supplied ATI drivers or did you upgrade as many others who are having problems have done?

Just an FYI, I have an ATI 9800 model video card and I'm running Mandrake 10 - I have not been able to get those drivers to work with Mandrake yet.
It may well be the fact that I've updated my kernel, via Mandrake update, or something else.
I've tried RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, Xandros, Lindows (Linspire) and all these distributions seem to have serious problems when trying to install third party drivers, espcially 3D drivers. On a Windows platform it takes me no more than 5 minutes and a restart to get new 3D drivers to work - on any of the distributions I've used its taken me about 3 weeks and at times I've given up .
I will be posting my problem on these forums and hopefully I'll get someone to help me, but it is a bit frustrating.

I appreciate that replyn00blar. It seems that I will be no better off switching distros then.

no,

I'm using the ATI drivers right off the ATI site, as i like to use the updated drivers rather than the older drivers.

I't'd be cool if they did supply drivers on the Dl version.

it seems not, I personall haven't had too many problems getting the drivers to work properly for my ATI 9800 Pro 256MB (bios modded to a XT), but it seems for others, it takes an act of god to get them to work.