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Actually, I really do think a lot of what this fellow has to say is pretty legitimate. I went through a lot of these kinds of issues myself with Mandrake 8.0 and I still have problems today that drive me nuts enough to have to go for a brisk walk to cool down.

I don't want this to be perceived as a "mandrake sux, use gentoo" post, because I started with Mandrake myself and it is what got me interested enough in Linux to stick with it. But a lot of what the author mentions, such as not knowing where to find configuration files, are problems I went through. The problem with Mandrake is that, if it works well for what you need, you'll probably like it, especially if you don't like digging around in your OS too much.

If it doesn't, however, it's a sort of complicated black box if you're not already a Linux geek. You're basically trying to unravel layers, top down, to figure out where things are. It's like trying to figure out how a car engine works with a fully assembled car, and no diagrams. You can pick around and figure things out but it's not the best way to learn.

As for dealing with plugins and dependencies and RPMs, I doubt anyone who has used an alternate system like apt-get in Debian or portage in Gentoo hasn't been irritated as hell about these things. I know I have. I still have machines at work that run Red Hat, and I have to deal with these problems from time to time (not too often though; they're servers).

See, my first distro was Mandrake, and after about 8 months of being irritated by problems similar to the author's (though not *specifically* multimedia; I don't care much about DVDs and the like), I decided to ignore all of the puffery about Debian and Gentoo, and pick one, and just see if there were any advantages. I decided to dive in as deep as possible and went for Gentoo.

Now Gentoo is like building a car engine, ground up. Here's a piston, here's a spark plug, this is how they work together and what they do. Rather than digging down to find things, I build from the ground up, so that, when the install was done, I knew where everything was and what things relied on. I *am* a Gentoo cheerleader; I admit this, though it's hardly a religious matter for me. For my style of learning, I found that the time investment in installing Gentoo - which takes some time, and is manual, is far less than the time investment it took me to unravel Mandrake from the top down. (Note that now that I have been using Gentoo for this long, I probably could work just fine with Mandrake, just because I know how things work a lot better).

I have since installed Debian-Unstable as well, which has many of the same benefits as Gentoo, and is quick and easy to install (the installer isn't as "pretty", but it's as simple as any other Linux distro's installer, as far as I'm concerned).

Neither of these distros will be appropriate for everyone, but I would suggest that, like me, the initial time investment in something like Gentoo is probably far less than the *total time expenditure* for figuring out what the hell distros like Mandrake are doing. That's *my* opinion, and these distributions are far more structured toward the way I like to learn things than Mandrake.

I would suggest that there are a *lot* of Mandrake, SuSE, and Red Hat users who would probably be incredibly surprised by Gentoo (and Debian, of course). Someone mentioned in an article here on OSNews some time ago (maybe it was just linked from here) that a lot of Gentoo users are ex-Mandrake users. I'm one, and there are many others.

I don't know if Debian or Gentoo will make your experiences with ISDN hardware or DVDs easier. But I will say that you will be exposed to most possible places that you would configure these devices directly, as you install and compile your system (and your kernel), and will probably encounter configuration areas you didn't know even existed.

Plus, chances are (esp. with Debian which has a huge software collection, though Gentoo isn't a slich) you simply won't have to deal with dependency issues at all. I never do. Sometimes ebuilds fail because of a human error or whatever, but I haven't yet run into "this can't install because this library isn't installed yet" even once, in about 9 months of using Gentoo. Ditto with Debian. I got a full desktop up and running with the latest KDE in about an hour with Debian, on a P2-400. Mandrake's software manager/internet updater (forget what it's called) simply can't compete - yet - in terms of reliability.

Also in closing I would say that Linux never will be Windows, and I'm kind of bored with the constant chorus that it should be like Windows. Linux should be as easy as it can be without sacrificing versatility and customizability, and if it never is as easy as Windows - a very closed environment, I just don't care. I don't use it for that reason. If it can be as easy and still have that versatility, great, but there's just a whole population out there for whom Linux is just never going to be worth it. And for whom, I might add, all of the things we Linux users hate about Linux *simply aren't issues* (such as a cruddy CLI).

It may well be that Mandrake's folly is that it does try too hard to be a plug-and-play, configure-it-all-for-you OS, just like Windows. For some people, that desktop is appropriate. Some people even love it. Very cool. It's just not for me, and I don't agree that Mandrake is always the best choice for a beginner. It isn't. It's the best choice for certain kinds of beginners (like me, just to see what Linux was before deciding to really get into it), but Gentoo and Debian seem best for people who know they want to take a plunge. For seasoned Linux users, almost any distro will do, you can pull apart and modify your system to look like most others.

But if Mandrake is causing the author this much frustration, it seems like it might be a great idea to try another distro. After all, most of them are free anyway!

Mandrake was a great first distro for me, and if I had to use it for some reason now, I could, probably without a problem (of course I'd have no issues with recompiling a kernel now or things like that). But Gentoo just seems to be all aces for me, and I don't think I'll be moving to another distro anytime soon (Probably if I'd tried Debian before Gentoo, I would have stuck with that, too. I like both a lot).

Their reputations for being time-consuming and complicated are highly overstated and misrepresented (in most cases). I recommend the author give one or both a try, and to not be too turned off by people taunting him for "not being able to get Linux working right". That's just unfair, and a cruddy attitude. The point here is that the author *is being incredibly tenacious* in light of this frustration, and maybe a little compassion, understanding, and most of all, encouragement -- rather than derision -- is in order. I've been where he is. I've been angry and about to kick my monitor in. Generally I find out it's some stupid little configuration setting that's not right or something, but remember, most people are coming from Windows and don't *think* Linux yet. That may seem backward to old-time sysadmins who have been using UNIX since the 70s, but that's how it is, that's where I come from, and it is surmountable, but it can be maddening. Rarely a week goes by where I'm not cursing wildly about something. But eventually I get through it, and in the end, for me, it's more than worth it.