[NTLUG:Discuss] Die hard SuSE fan... err... Mandrake 8.0!

[Chris Cox]

Looking for a Linux distribution to go on the hardware
I am planning to sell has been tough.  My dear old
SuSE at first seemed to be the best choice.  Polished,
simple and chopped full of software.  Mandrake which
has always been desktop centric as well always seemed
to have too many bugs for me to consider it.

Having not tried Mandrake since the pre 7 days... I
decided to try 8.0.  WOW!

You get:
Kernel 2.4.3
XF86 4.0.3 (3d ready... something even SuSE seems to have
   missed on 7.1... it works, but I was planning on redoing
   it "right" if I went with SuSE... Mandrake does it right
   out of the box)
Qt with RENDER extension!! (Anti-aliased fonts in all KDE
   apps!)... I know this is eye-candy stuff... but it really
   makes a HUGE difference.
KDE 2.1.1 (not bad... much better than 2.0)
GNOME ... Mandrake is one of the first distributions where
   I found that both environments work EQUALLY as well
   out of the box.  Well done.  With RH, KDE is tack-on...
   with SuSE, GNOME is a tack-on.... with Mandrake 8.0
   you get BOTH... and they both WORK!
RPM Installer... Very cool.  Graphical software package
   installation, notification of new packages.  Easiest
   graphical installer I've seen.

ALL optimized for 586 and above machines.  Feels very fast.

... on the down side....

Mandrake is still work in progress.  Their hardware
detection couldn't find my old non-PnP SoundBlaster 16
(no surprise), but didn't even let me configure it
manually (that's a mistake).  Easy enough to do outside
of the GUIs... but something they could work on.

Clean and simple out of the box... just what I wanted
in a Linux distribution.  Sorry SuSE 7.1, just too
many issues to get that distribution workable.

Files in Mandrake are laid out weird.  I'm going to
run an LHS test on it.  I wonder if it follows
RH?  Installing software packages NOT from Mandrake
will most certainly scatter files in other locations.
That's one thing I liked about SuSE... they tended
to leave stuff where it naturally wanted to install
instead of forcing their packages to conform to
some SuSE specific layout.

Anyway, if you haven't tried Mandrake 8.0.... it's
definitely worth a look.  Haven't done much
on the server side... I do know that I asked
it to set up for database access and it configured
PostgreSQL correctly!

Regards,
Chris