OSNews

I really want to like Mandriva. It was the first distro I got real comfortable with for everyday regular work use. And after some fairly uncomfortable experiences with one or two earlier versions of the last few years, like they just would not install, or having installed wouldn't run properly, I was persuaded by rave reviews to have another go for a client with 2007. The reviews, and as usual, we were seduced by the fact that there is a very complete user guide, and that great GUI administration centre which does everything you will ordinarily want, very simply and intuitively.

We have put in three installs. One is very slow but works. One has had some mysterious hiccups after an upgrade - X just vanished. It was probably due to having lapsed into using proprietary codecs - this was the One KDE version. We fixed it, but have not upgraded again. The third one is also basically OK, except that it refuses to mount some USB sticks. Just some. Which mount fine on other systems. No idea why. And also from time to time it hangs while booting. Always of course when the machine has been switched on by a committed windows user. Again, don't know why.

And then there is the update issue. No, we do not want to go through a total clean installation every time we have to update, with results which are basically going to be unpredictable.

So, do we go for 2008? Sadly, we're going to take them all to Debian Lenny. Debian is going to be much harder for the client to administer, but they probably will never need to do it. Keeping up to date is going to be much simpler. And it will never hang while booting, and USB sticks will always mount. Don't know what would surface if we went to 2008, but something would. Something different of course.

Wish it weren't so. But that is just experience. It doesn't always disappoint, when it works, its brilliant, but it does disappoint often enough that you come to the end of it.