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Testing Mandriva

Three years ago I switched from Windows to Ubuntu and never looked back. One of the things I wanted to do from the beginning was test other Linux distributions.

Since I only had one main machine, I did not want to risk messing up a working Ubuntu installation by installing other distributions. Now that I have a spare machine, I can safely test distributions.

The first distribution I picked to test is Mandriva Linux One 2009 using KDE 4 as desktop environment. Since I am a GNOME user, I decide to use this opportunity to test both another distribution as well as another desktop environment.

The downloaded .iso image creates a bootable Live CD.

The first issue I had was that the CD failed to load the graphical desktop (Bug #43870). This I was able to overcome easily by following the instructions here.

Here are my initial impressions:

Installation
The graphical installation procedure of Mandriva was pretty straight forward. However the partition editor in Ubuntu is by far more user friendly and easy to follow. I wanted to resize my existing Ubuntu partition and create a new partition for Mandriva. The labels were confusing, for example I did not know whether 'New Size' referred to the old existing partition, or the newly created one. It turns out that this applies to the newly created partition.

Boot Times
Here I was not able to notice any differences. Both operating systems boot relatively fast.

Hardware Recognition
I was immediately impressed by the hardware recognition. Just about all hardware in my Asus A6K was found and installed. Even my Wacom Bamboo tablet was found and installed (although it was set up as a mouse). Here I feel Ubuntu needs to catch up a little.

Menu Structure
Another aspect I liked was a unified configuration menu. All configurations were grouped together. I do not know if this is specific to Mandriva, or just KDE. But I found it to be quite user friendly.

Theme
The default theme was a little too dark for my taste. That might sound funny coming from an Ubuntu user, where the default theme in Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) is darker than other operating systems.

Desktop Effects
One development in Ubuntu that I view with disappointment, is that desktop effects are turned on by default if you have a specific generation of hardware. I personally do not like to have effects turned on. So since Ubuntu 8.04 I keep having to turn them off and remove these packages. In Mandriva it was nice to be given the choice to turn desktop effects on or off during the installation.